“Music says what I need to say. And it is dangerous to say anything, because if I’ve said it already in words there might be nothing left for my music.”
John Allison of The Telegraph has published an interview with Arvo Pärt. Find the full text on The Telegraph.
Arvo Pärt plays the piano and talks about Für Alina and Tintinnabuli (the video is in German):
On the occasion of the Gerhard Richter exhibition at Fondation Beyeler, the renowned Estonian Gregorian chant ensemble Vox Clamantis paid homage to Arvo Pärt this August.
The Fondation Beyeler has uploaded a video of the stunning performance on YouTube:
Pärt had dedicated his choral work Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima to Richter, which was performed for the very first time at the exhibition.
Adrian Searle of The Guardian has recently published an article on the art of Gerhard Richter. Richter on his Double Grey paintings and Arvo Pärt: “We tried to make something together. He wrote a composition, and I made these.”
Read the full article on The Guardian.
On 15 October the Japan Art Association in Tokyo presented Arvo Pärt with the prestigious Praemium Imperiale cultural award, considered equal to the Nobel Prize in the field of culture.
Watch a video of the press conference on YouTube:
Read more about the event on the website of the Arvo Pärt Centre.
Find out more about Arvo Pärt on our Blog titled Arvo Pärt in his 80th year.
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From 29 September to 3 October, Leopold Brauneiss, a recognized Austrian musicologist and expert on Arvo Pärt’s compositional techniques, will give a special seminar about Arvo Pärt’s music titled “Another look at Tintinnabuli: An introduction to aesthetics and compositional technique.” The seminars take place at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. You can register for the seminar on the website of the Arvo Pärt Centre. Find out more about Arvo Pärt on our Blog titled Arvo Pärt in his 80th year. |
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Arvo Pärt’s music is simple in its means, and powerful in its effect. It has its own very distinctive personality, one that could hardly belong to any other living composer. He is as close to being a ‘household name’ as any classical composer in this lower-brow century can hope to be. (Meurig Bowen) Today, 29 September, Hyperion Records releases a new CD with the choral music by Arvo Pärt performed by Polyphony (cond. Stephen Layton). Listen to excerpts of the 12 works and read texts and liner notes (which are available in three languages) on Hyperion. A download of Peace upon you, Jerusalem for female choir a cappella is available for free. |
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Online entries have opened for the Dulwich Piano Festival, which will take place on 7 June 2015 at the James Allen’s Girls’ School. Based in South London, the Dulwich Piano Festival is in its fourth year and has around 130 competitors of all ages taking part.
View the Dulwich Piano Festival’s Syllabus online.
To pay homage to Arvo Pärt, Für Anna Maria has been chosen for the Set Pieces class for an Open Class, which will be adjudicated by pianist Frances Wilson.
Find the Dulwich Piano Festival on Facebook.
I began with the idea of unravelling Carmen the woman… to find the vulnerability beneath the cold, heartless exterior. In the process of research, there was so much to unravel: I searched for Bizet and found Shchedrin. (Dada Masilo)
After her successful tour with Swan Lake (which featured Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel), Dada Masilo returned to the stage earlier this month with her ballet Carmen. Again the music of Arvo Pärt will be present in her ballet, this time she choreographed Lamentate for piano and orchestra.
A live stream of the performance on 28 September at the Biennale de la danse will be available on ARTE at 20:00. Watch the live stream.
The composer on Lamentate:
With respect to its form, however, the composition cannot really be described as a typical piano concerto. I chose the piano to be the solo instrument because it fixes our attention on something that is ‘one’. This ‘one’ could be a person, or perhaps a first-person narrative. Just as the sculpture leaves the viewer with a light and floating impression in spite of its overwhelming size, the piano, as a large instrument, allowed me to create a sphere of intimacy and warmth that no longer seems anonymous or abstract.
Watch a trailer of Carmen:
Happy 79th Birthday Arvo Pärt!
To initiate the upcoming celebrations and honour the composer in his 80th year of birth, Universal Edition will be collecting upcoming performance dates, reviews, new CD releases and more on a dedicated blog. If you’ve got anything to share, let us know via hashtag #ArvoPart80 – get tweeting!
The Arvo Pärt Days in Tallinn start today with performances of Adam’s Lament, Beatus Petronius, Salve Regina, Statuit ei Dominus, Alleluia-Tropus, L’abbé Agathon, the Estonian Lullaby and the Christmas Lullaby:
Further concerts will take place on 3., 4., 6. 9, and finally on 11 September, the composer’s 79th birthday.
Find out more on our performance calendar.
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Many classical music listeners will be familiar with the name Darius Milhaud, but how familiar are they with his output? The owner of a bold, individual style, Milhaud was active for much of the 20th century, a modernist who is counted among the group of composers known as ‘Les Six’ (a term coined by the music critic Henri Collet in 1920) and who was much influenced by jazz, polytonality as well as the sounds of Brazil. Brilliant Classics will release two new double CDs on 25 August: view the full track lists and introductory texts of Arvo Pärt: Für Anna Maria, Complete Piano Music and Milhaud: Orchestral Music on the website of Brilliant Classics. |
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New York’s celebration of Arvo Pärt earlier this year offered an opportunity to explore the spiritual content of the composer’s music, and to discover how the spaces in which music is performed can amplify its emotional power. In this program, neuroscientist Robert Zatorre explains how music can engage the reward system deep in our brains – the same system that responds to food and sex. Architect Steven Holl describes making spaces for music, and shows how music influences his work. Theologian Peter Bouteneff talks about the thread of spirituality that weaves throughout Pärt’s masterpieces.
Spark is hosted by Julie Burstein, author and Peabody Award–winning creator of public radio’s Studio 360.
Recorded June 11, 2014
Credits: This event is a collaboration between The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Arvo Pärt Project at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary.
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Arvo Pärt has been awarded the 2014 Praemium Imperiale award for music. The composer will receive the prize in a ceremony held in Tokyo on October 15.
Among this year’s other winners are the South African playwright Athol Fugard, French painter Martial Raysse, Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone and American architect Steven Holl.
Before Pärt, the UE composers Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti, Alfred Schnittke, Luciano Berio and Steve Reich have received the award.
The Spanish office Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos has won a competition to design the new home for the Arvo Pärt Centre in the woodland of Laulasmaa, west of Tallinn.
The winning proposal is conceived as a sequence of interconnected public and private spaces below a large single roof, for which not a single tree of the forest will be felled.
The new building for the Arvo Pärt Centre will open its doors to the public in 2018.
View a gallery of the project on dezeen.
José Manuel Barroso, President of the EC, and Taavi Rõivas, Estonian Prime Minister, recently visited the Arvo Pärt Centre to create opportunities for preserving and researching the creative heritage of Arvo Pärt in his native country.
More photos are available on the website of the European Commission.
Watch a video of the visit here: