Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir – Tallinn Chamber Orchestra – Tõnu Kaljuste
Works by Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt is everywhere. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, his works have been performed more widely than those of almost any other composer. The sonic cosmos he conceived – a crystalline, near-monastic music that bears the touch of snow and comes closer than any other to silence – has long since transcended the private realm of the composer’s imagination. It is now recognised as one of the most riveting musical corpora of the past hundred years, cherished alike by devoted adherents of classical music and by audiences shaped by contemporary culture.

It is impossible to speak of Pärt without returning to his moment of transformation – a paradigm of artistic rebirth, inner quest, and musical reinvention. In the mid-twentieth century, feeling confined within the dominant yet rigid currents of the avant-garde – serialism, aleatory music, collage, and neoclassicism – Pärt withdrew from composition completely and embraced silence. In that stillness, he sought a new musical language,

one of ascetic essence and translucent truth. He invested himself in an intensive study of Gregorian chant, Orthodox liturgical music, and the early polyphony of the Renaissance. In 1972, he was received into the Orthodox Church; from that moment onward, his faith became the lodestar of his artistic mission: to bring forth a spiritual beauty seeking expression through sound.

The compositional system he developed, known as tintinnabuli, enabled him to approach this sparse music of the higher spheres through a lucid and disciplined technique – one that elevates the impact of the minimal musical trace, the unadorned resonance of a single note, to its fullest expressive potential.

In a celebration of the life and work of the Estonian master, this evening at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus brings together emblematic works from his vocal oeuvre, both solo and choral. The demanding task of interpretation is entrusted to the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Tõnu Kaljuste – Pärt’s long-standing collaborators for decades, who have played a critical role in shaping and disseminating the understanding of his musical language. Their presence on the stage of the ancient theatre promises an evening of profound musical devotion: a true vesper of sound, marked by unalloyed emotion and offered as a gesture of gratitude to a great hierophant, who once distilled the power of music into these few words: “If one can kill with a sound, then one can also heal with a sound.”