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With the extraordinary diversty of musical styles this century, a labelling system has necessarily evolved to keep track of them all - from neo-classical, post modern, serial and the 'new complexity', to more idiosyncratic, less objective classifications such as the "English Cowpat School" and "squeaky gate" .On the great musical supermarket shelf Arvo Pärt is broadly known as a "mystic minimalist". This may be a crass description, as all neat pigeon-holes tend inevitably to be, but it is as good a starting point as any for description Pärt 's output in the last two decades.
It is significant that his two other mystic minimalist shelfmates are John Taverner and Henryk Górecki , making a threesome whose stars have arguably shone more brightly, in commercial terms at least, than any other living composers in recent years (but for the other more secular minimalist Reich, Glass, Nyman and Adams). Taverner and Górecki have experienced similar stylistic journeys too, reaching their current spare, austere vernacular from radically different, who rubbed shoulders with The Beatles; and Górecki, a man whose early scores were characterized by monumental gesture, cacophony and clusters.
The tale of Pärt's stylistic transformation, in its oversimplified form, is beguiling and glamorous; Estonia 's enfant terrible produces the country's first 12-tone score in 1960,proceeds to write a number of shocking, dissonant pieces until 1968, then goes silent for eight years, and emerges with a confoundingly new musical voice which is exquisitely subtle, consonant and resonates with the sound-world and technique of the medieval and Renaissance masters. For those relieved by this shift from the avant-garde to the quasi-ancient, from fragmented gesturing to soothing introspection, the most immediate analog must be that of the caterpillar and the butterfly, the chrysalis being Pärt's years of silence.
Of course, time and popular imagination have artificially manufactured this account of creative metamorphosis. Pärt did in fact write a major work, the Third Symphony, in 1971 - during the fabled "silence" - and it is a crucial, transitional piece, which hints strongly at the style to come, with its pervasive pseudo-medievalism and polyphonic grandeur. And whilst if you compare his early work to the post - 1976 "tintinnabulist" style the difference will seem as extreme as viewing a Gothic cathedral alongside an edifice of Le Corbusier, it is wrong to imagine that the composer underwent a complete switch of sensibility between the two creative periods.
Pärt's serious, solemn nature is very much present in both, and one can discern just as much sense of dramatic control, of ebb and flow, in the modernist collage of the 1960s as in the best scores of recent years. The musical means may be worlds aPärt, but the temperament and spirit of the man remain the same.
Another Pärt of the dressed-up version of Pärt's lifepath is that he has only been "discovered" in the last decade or so, rescued from an Eastern-bloc obscurity by an enlightened, receptive West. It is a romantic, patronizing notion, which fits well with the chrysalis analogy. But only in the broad, mega-commercial sense is it true.
Pärt studied at the Talinn Conservatorium from the late-fifties until 1963, and even before graduating won first prize in the Pan-Soviet Union Young Composers "Competition with a children's cantata and oratorio. The extraordinarily compact essay in serial, palindromic layering Perpeuum Mobile, written in 1964 and dedicated to Luigi Nono, was presented successfully at numerous new-music festivals around Europe at that time. And the cello concerto, subtitled "pro et contra", was commissioned by Rostropovich no less - surely firm proof that the young, modernist Pärt was no obscure recluse from the grim backwaters of eastern Europe.
The austerity and disarming simplicity of Pärt's tintinnabulist works have led to a common criticism that this music is naïve and washed-out;" it's all the same, just a sea of A minor triads and precious silence", one hears; or, as The New Yorker recently wrote, "Aural pillows that you can sink into' (ie, not far removed from that amoebic sludge in sound's evolution which is Elevator Music). Through careful selection of Pärt's choral output, avoiding the more static, etiolated works, and through robust performances of wide emotional range, it is truly impassioned, dramatic aspect to the composer's musical personality.
What could be more impassioned and dramatic in late-twentieth-century music than the centrally placed 'O Schlussel Davids' in the Seven Magnificat Antiphons, which its ecstatically pleading multiple layers of closely packed harmony? Or the fortissimo exclamation of the seventh antiphon - "O Emmanuel, our king and teacher" - where repeated blocks of A major are transfigured by simply-got suspensions in the middle Pärts?
It is ultimately Pärt's finest achievement that he can deliver intense, direct, sometimes sensual emotion with the barest and simplest of materials - perhaps analogous to the Norman and early-Gothic church architecture for which he exhibits such affinity. Stone and glass; structure and space; eloquence through simplicity.
Such eloquence and simplicity shines through in all this tintinnabulist work, where the music's procedures essential comprise an extravagantly pure union of the (mostly) diatonic scale and arpeggio, and always-resourceful manoeuvrings of the triad. The Agnus Dei of the Berlin Mass, for example, features alternating vocal strands which are bleak on paper, yet sensual and yielding in performance. And its conclusion, through the simplest of devices, is Pärticularly warm; paired upper and lower voices sing the same music but a crotchet aPärt, creating the serene collisions and harmonic expressivity for which Pärt seems to have the subtlest of ears. ( A similar device occurs in John Tavener's extraordinary Hymn to the Mother of God, though the two choirs here are further temporally separated.)
And alongside the drama and awesome climax of some of this disc's music is Pärt's exquisite sense of control and restraint. Texts like the Magnificat or Sanctus - so many times set by his predecessors in a wave of unbounded joy - acquire a more muted sense of wonderment in Pärt's world: the slightly chilled, restrained ecstasy of the former, with the pensive presence of a C pedal throughout; the sombre processional of the latter, sopranos absent, and with no upbeat transition into the Hosanna.
If Pärt has sidestepped conventionality in the setting of some texts, he is closer to the norm in a work such as De Profundis. With a certain body of precedent from earlier times for musical pictorialism, the deep, furry tones of contra-bass voices emerge 'de profundis'. The booming, thumping intercessions of the bass drum serve perhaps as a primeval heartbeat. And, ever so gradually, the music builds in texture and dynamic level to a climax of awesome proportions, matching the Psalmist's journey from anguish and despair to a firm hope of redemption. It is a work of perfect structure and immaculately achieved expression.
BERLIN MASS
Commissioned by the 90th Deutsche Katholikentage in Berlin, 1990. The original version was for four solo voices and organ, but subsequent versions exist for choir and organ - as here - and choir and strings. The Credo is Pärticularly interesting in that it is virtually a re-incarnation of the earlier Summa-but this time in a major key. Summa was written at a time when profession of faith was outlawed in Estonia; hence Pärt's diversionary title for a setting of the Creed. The switch from minor to major clearly celebrates the greater freedoms enjoyed in post-Communist Europe.
THE BEATITUDES
Completed in 1990 (and revised in 1991) for the RIAS Chamber Choir, this is Pärt's first setting of an English text, and exhibits a consistent approach to each phrase's metre-short flanked by longer ones. A series of upwards chromatic shifts, marked by bass pedal notes in the organ, raises the work's tonal area to a climax on 'Amen' around C sharp minor, before a flurry of quintuplet broken chords in the organ rapidly hurls the music back down to its opening tonality of F minor.
ANNUM PER ANNUM
Along with Pari Intervallo, this is the best known and most performed of Pärt's small number of solo organ works. It was written in 1980 for the 900th anniversary of the cathedral in Speyer, South Germany. The five central dance-like variations relate to the movements of the Mass - the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus - and they are flanked by an imposing introduction and coda. Here, Pärt suggests that the organ's motor is respectively switched off and on again in order to effect a diminuendo and crescendo-hence a crashing opening and a crashing conclusion. It is not a stipulation, however, and in this performance, on the organ of St Paul's Cathedral, it was not electrically possible. Here, therefore, the effect has been achieved by gradual reduction and increase of registration. The extraordinary acoustic of the building seems to take care of the rest.
MAGNIFICANT
Rachel Elliot soprano
Commissioned by the Deutscher Musikrat, and composed in 1989 for Christian Grube and the Staats- und Domchor of Berlin. As one of Pärt's most widely performed choral works, it derives its effect from a gentle eloquence - without actually 'setting' the text in a descriptive way - and from the contrast of verse - and tutti-like sections.
SEVEN MAGNIFICANT ANTIPHONS
Composed 1988 and revised 1991. Written for the RIAS Chamber Choir in Berlin (Pärt's city of residence since 1982). These antiphons, each endowed with a very Pärticular personality by Pärt, are assigned in the liturgy to the seven days leading up to Christmas Eve.
DE PROFUNDIS
A setting of Psalm 130 for for male voices, organ, bass drum, tam-tam and a single tubular bell. Written in 1980, shortly after Pärt's move from Estonia to Vienna. Dedicated to the composer Gottfried von Einem.
1998 Meurig Bowen
Hyperion Records
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