The Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir performed music of Arvo P\u00e4rt Saturday night at Carnegie Hall.
\nArvo P\u00e4rt is, if not the most popular contemporary composer, certainly the most beloved. The crowd that came out to see a concert of his music at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night was notable not only for its variety but for its concentration towards the music and adoration of the man himself.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lesson hidden in plain site there for classical music organizations chasing new audiences as their old subscribers die off. P\u00e4rt has crossover appeal but does not make crossover music, there\u2019s no sense in his aesthetic that he\u2019s even aware of any of the trends or stars in popular music over the past fifty years.<\/p>\n
That the Estonian composer\u2019s music tends to be beautiful helps, but the nature of that beauty matters. His sound world is austere, slightly hermetic, rigorously made, and he never panders. The style is called \u201ctintinnabuli\u201d\u2014little bells\u2014which is evocative but misleading. The ubiquitous sound he creates is etched, hard, like a cut diamond. His music rings but with an edge.<\/p>\n
The concert program, played and sung by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by T\u00f6nu Kaljuste (all musicians long associated with his work), spanned over forty years, from Fratres and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten from 1977 to Adam\u2019s Lament from 2009. It was organized and presented by The Arv\u00f6 Part Project, conceived by two faculty members at St. Vladimir\u2019s Orthodox Theological Seminary. The project \u201cseeks to explore the connections between Orthodox theology, spirituality, and liturgical life and P\u00e4rt\u2019s oeuvre.\u201d<\/p>\n
The composer has pointed out that his \u201cphilosophy\u201d comes out of his Orthodox faith. For his liturgical music to touch so many outside that faith, including atheists, might smack of cultural slumming from listeners, but his aesthetic\u2014spiritual without being soporific or maudlin\u2014speaks to music lovers with the same direct human sympathies as does Paul Robeson singing \u201cThere is a Balm in Gilead.\u201d<\/p>\n
And there is the bracing abstraction to keep the senses on edge. Fratres is one of his great masterpieces and the work that made him famous in the ECM recording from Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett. The Talinn Orchestra played it in an arrangement for violin soloist\u2014concertmaster Harry Traksmann\u2014string orchestra and percussion. Fratres has been arranged in many different ways, and rather than diluting the music, each arrangement has made the piece stronger, revealing facet after facet.<\/p>\n
Traksmann jumped off the hypnotic arpeggiations with an intensity that almost had the bow flying out of his hand. But the music, and Kaljuste\u2019s quietly commanding, minimal conducting kept him together, and was elegant, with a deeply felt core of strength.<\/p>\n
This is not the only group that plays P\u00e4rt\u2019s music, but they are the only one that can maintain a blade-like precision and strength of intonation that seems to carry the resonance of a church with it, even in the mellow acoustics of Carnegie. The achingly simple Cantus\u2014a repeated descending string line, some counterpoint, a chime\u2014was case in point, though the audience\u2019s desire to show their appreciation drowned out the complex decay of the last chime stroke.<\/p>\n
The instrumental pieces were warm-ups for the choral works: Adam\u2019s Lament, Salve Regina and Te Deum. The first is not strictly liturgical, but absolutely Orthodox philosophy, from a meditation by St. Silouan. The short, even phrases, the clarity of the counterpoint and the certainty of the harmonic rhythm are where the ringing sound of the music comes from: the structural spaces in the compositions are there for filling by the resonant architecture of a church, antiphony between ceremonial music and ceremonial space.<\/p>\n
In the secular concert hall, the simple beauty and feeling of settings like \u201cMy soul wearies for the Lord\u201d is still powerful, especially with such affecting, illuminating singing. The austere structural means of Salve Regina had a sublime expression. Where comparable settings like Josquin\u2019s mostly affect the untrained ear, it\u2019s easy to hear how P\u00e4rt\u2019s moving pieces come together into a whole, and, like Stravinsky\u2019s neo-classical music, this is a great intellectual and aesthetic virtue.<\/p>\n
Te Deum is from the same mid\u20131980s period that emphasized utter simplicity and produced the great Passio, and is that work\u2019s equal. Closing the concert, it was the most church-like, with the chorus divided into three parts, the altos and basses flanking the orchestra and the tenors and sopranos, with their floating, angelic harmonies, behind.<\/p>\n
Cycling between the modal tonal centers of D and A, alternating between triadic homophony and polyphony, rocking back and forth from minor to major, this was the clearest expression of P\u00e4rt\u2019s faith and philosophy. The music could belong to any era, the ritual of the service it\u2019s built on holds the passage of time in abeyance, the shape moves from meditation to transcendence. One needn\u2019t be Orthodox, or have any kind of faith, to hear the beauty that faith can give through those that do believe.<\/p>\n
The Arvo P\u00e4rt Project continues with a performance of Kanon Pokajanen 7 p.m. June 2, at the Temple of Dendur, Metropolitan Museum of Art. arvop\u00e4rtproject.com.<\/p>\n
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