There\u2019s something about the music of Arvo P\u00e4rt that makes people stop driving. In the late 1970s, the record producer Manfred Eicher heard it on the car radio and pulled off the road to listen until it was over. In 1984, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the future president of Estonia, at the time a college professor in Canada, heard on his car radio the recording Eicher had subsequently released. He pulled off the road in his turn. Ilves told his story to the audience at the start of a remarkable free concert of P\u00e4rt\u2019s music at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall Tuesday night that made everyone in the concert hall, though not driving, certainly stop, listen and marvel.
\nThe audience was primed to be enthusiastic. When Garth Ross, the Kennedy Center\u2019s vice president for community engagement, mentioned in his pre-concert remarks that the composer was present, the crowd \u2014 and how many living classical composers can fill a 2,400-seat concert hall? \u2014 rose to its feet with a prolonged standing ovation, until the 78-year-old composer, bearded and slight and looking more like a rumpled professor than the monk with whom he is often compared, rose from his seat in the balcony with gestures of acknowledgment. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t happen every day,\u201d Ross observed when the noise had died down.
\nNor does it happen every day that an audience gets to hear such stunning performances \u2014 by, in this case, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, under founder Tonu Kaljuste \u2014 of such strong music.
\nI recently wrote that P\u00e4rt appeals both to classical and non-classical audiences, not least because he epitomizes a spirituality that gives his music a sense of a greater meaning without crossing into mere New Age-y effect-mongering. Yet this concert made me think that, popular though his music is, it may still be underestimated. I\u2019ve heard some people in the classical world aver that P\u00e4rt is a one-trick pony, using the technique he calls tintinnabulation, which involves juxtaposing a melodic line with its related triads, to write music of arresting simplicity, offering spirituality rather than sophistication. Anyone who was present on Tuesday can testify that this claim is false.
\nAll of P\u00e4rt\u2019s music is easily identifiable, it\u2019s true; like most great artists, he has a clear set of fingerprints. But each of the four pieces on Tuesday\u2019s program, especially the relatively brief \u201cCantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,\u201d was a world of its own, from the dramatic string stabs and dark male voices in \u201cAdam\u2019s Lament\u201d (the most recent work, written in 2009) to the repeating, descending, aching, intensifying phrases of the \u201cCantus,\u201d touched by the pure and wistful tolling of bells. And while spirituality is central to his life and music, P\u00e4rt is no more or less a \u201creligious composer\u201d than Bach \u2014 whose pure and brilliant Passions P\u00e4rt\u2019s \u201cTe Deum,\u201d the final piece on Tuesday\u2019s program, called to mind.
\nThere\u2019s nothing superficial about P\u00e4rt\u2019s music; it\u2019s steeped in a profound knowledge of the vocabulary of the Western canon, reaching back to the medieval plainchant that it so audibly evokes. P\u00e4rt simply takes the same data as many other composers \u2014 the instruments of the orchestra, the voices of the chorus \u2014 and arrives at his own unique conclusions.
\nAnother rare thing about Tuesday\u2019s performance: hearing performers who are expert in a living classical tradition. The classical world has a number of European ensembles that are steeped in the music of composers they\u2019ve been playing for centuries. Seldom, though, do you hear groups that have come to world renown with a tradition whose creator is sitting in the audience.
\nKaljuste, a towering figure who looks a lot like Liam Neeson and, as he ages, also like Franz Liszt, conducts with an authority that translates his gestures into sounds. At one point in the \u201cTe Deum,\u201d he extended the fingers of an already-upraised hand and you could hear the subtle change in sound in the men\u2019s chorus, exactly corresponding. He has led most of P\u00e4rt\u2019s major works in their world premieres and first recordings, and he and the players offered expertise and flexibility, coupling the majesty of some of the larger moments in the music with a sense of intimacy that\u2019s very much in keeping with P\u00e4rt\u2019s work.
\nThe least compelling performance was the opening piece, \u201cFratres,\u201d one of many versions of one of P\u00e4rt\u2019s best-known works. It was played \u2014 I think deliberately \u2014 with a straightforwardness that was the antithesis of the heightened emotion many bring to this juxtaposition of seesawing violin patterns (played with gentle clarity by the concertmaster, Harry Traksmann) and organ-like string chords, but came off as slightly nonchalant. Playing without pathos, however, is generally a virtue in this music. One of P\u00e4rt\u2019s frequent effects \u2014 in, for instance, \u201cAdam\u2019s Lament\u201d \u2014 is having the strings seem to be drawing breath, like a supportive bellows, beneath a clear unspooling vocal line. This keeps a sense of the human in music that, however spiritual, is very much of this world.
\nIt was the first of four P\u00e4rt concerts in Washington and New York and an extravagant gift to an audience that, representing all ranges of age and sartorial taste, greeted it with the ardor of a rock-concert crowd, whooping and clapping and holding up cellphones to capture videos of the performers\u2019 bows when the music had finished.
\nThe gift wasn\u2019t restricted to those present, either. This concert was jointly presented by the Estonian Embassy (the ambassader, Marina Kaljurand, led fundraising efforts herself) and the Kennedy Center\u2019s Millennium Stage. Like all Millennium Stage performances, it can be seen, in its entirety, as a video on the Kennedy Center\u2019s Web site. Just don\u2019t try to watch it while you\u2019re driving.
\nThe Arvo P\u00e4rt Project series of concerts continues with a performance on Thursday at the Phillips Collection (sold out) and performances in New York at Carnegie Hall (Saturday) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Monday).<\/p>\n
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