At Ninety, Arvo Pärt and Terry Riley Still Sound Vital

In the outpouring of 1976, a Latvian architecture pupil named Hardijs Lediņš organized a euphony festival astatine the Riga Polytechnic Institute. The venue was a disused Anglican religion wherever Lediņš had been hosting a discothèque. The festival’s repertory ranged from thorny avant-garde creations by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage to Terry Riley’s mesmerically repetitive “In C,” which had archetypal been heard successful San Francisco successful 1964 and had much oregon little launched philharmonic minimalism. Within this offbeat milieu, determination arose an bonzer caller sound, 1 that combined minimalist tendencies with the ineffable formulas of Gregorian chant. The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt presented a enactment titled “Sarah Was Ninety Years Old”—an austere ritual involving percussion and wordless voices. The student Kevin C. Karnes, successful his 2021 book, “Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground,” writes that nonconformist Latvians embraced Pärt’s euphony arsenic an “uncompromising benignant of spiritual practice.”

The conjunction of Riley and Pärt astatine a Latvian discothèque was not arsenic improbable arsenic it mightiness seem. To beryllium sure, the 2 composers had small successful common, beyond being calved successful 1935. Riley was a pioneer of West Coast counterculture, whose ecstatically looping patterns had influenced psychedelic rock. Pärt was a devout individualist who had emerged from the Soviet taste strategy and tested its strictures astatine each turn. But the Californian and the Estonian converged connected a extremist reinvention of fundamentals. Both zeroed successful connected age-old scales and harmonies, extracted them from their accustomed contexts, and transformed them into objects of contemplation. The resulting euphony required caller ways of playing and caller ways of listening.

Nearly 50 years on, minimalism has go the worldly of cliché, its devices endlessly exploited connected movie and tv soundtracks. Yet Riley and Pärt, who are marking their ninetieth birthdays this year, stay intriguing outliers, notable for the stubbornness with which they person held to their youthful convictions. Riley remains progressive arsenic a composer and an improviser, collaborating with performers six oregon 7 decades his junior. Pärt, who has seemingly retired from originative work, offers an output that is acold much analyzable and contradictory than his monkish nationalist representation suggests. Recent celebratory concerts dedicated to the 2 person been sites not of reverence but of restless rediscovery. Both clasp the powerfulness to marque the acquainted strange.

Pärt is receiving the expansive treatment. Carnegie Hall hosted 2 all-Pärt events successful October, with much to travel aboriginal successful the season. The Estonian Festival Orchestra, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, nether the absorption of Paavo Järvi and Tõnu Kaljuste, travelled from Estonia to grant their compatriot. Alar Karis, the President of Estonia, came with them, posting connected societal media, “Arvo Pärt’s euphony brings radical unneurotic beyond connection & faith.” It struck maine that Pärt is astir apt his country’s astir celebrated typical connected the satellite stage—an antithetic presumption for a modern composer to hold.

It would person been casual to stress the audience-friendly broadside of Pärt’s œuvre—the hushed, hovering harmonies of “Fratres,” “Cantus successful Memory of Benjamin Britten,” and “Tabula Rasa,” immoderate of which, erstwhile played astatine mid-volume connected a location stereo, wrapper the listener successful a cocoon of comforting melancholy. Järvi presented these 3 pieces astatine Carnegie, but successful a mode that emphasized their interior tensions and hidden furies. The dynamics of “Cantus” scope from triple-piano to triple-forte; Järvi made the erstwhile borderline inaudible and the second visceral to the borderline of violence. In “Tabula Rasa,” Midori and the young Estonian virtuoso Hans Christian Aavik brought a manic strength to the solo-violin parts, hinting astatine Paganini-like diabolism. The assemblage burst into applause aft the archetypal movement. The immense stillness of the 2nd movement, with spectral arpeggios chiming connected a prepared piano, was each the much potent successful contrast.

Just arsenic important, Järvi included euphony from Pärt’s early, pre-1976 period, erstwhile helium had not yet recovered his minimalist-inflected dependable and was experimenting with a riotous array of avant-garde techniques. In “Perpetuum Mobile,” from 1963, strict serialist procedures accumulate into an content of hardly controlled bedlam. “Credo,” from 1968, pits the Prelude successful C from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” Book I, against upwellings of orchestral chaos and a variously chanting and shouting choir. Such apocalyptic moods besides qualify contemporaneous scores by Alfred Schnittke, Shostakovich’s contrarian successor. Schnittke supported Pärt’s crook toward an outwardly simpler, religiously oriented benignant and played the prepared soft successful respective aboriginal performances of “Tabula Rasa.”At Carnegie, the relation was taken by Nico Muhly, 1 of countless younger composers who person felt Pärt’s influence.