Arvo Pärt is 80 today. And, to celebrate the music of arguably the world’s most popular composer of contemporary classical music I’ve put together a list of five of his least known pieces. The point, dear reader, is to introduce some of Pärt’s early music that belongs, I believe, squarely in the canon of Pärt’s finest compositional achievements, but which isn’t represented enough in compilations, nor does it ever feature on the soundtracks to films, TV shows, and documentaries. Soundtracks which have, in my view, sometimes reduced and traduced Pärt’s accessible yet austere music of recent decades.
Pärt’s serene but pain-wracked and tortuously hard-won “tintinnabuli” style (I mean music like this) has become a too-cheaply bought musical signifier of emotional extremes, when the music itself is more mysterious and more powerful than any of the dramatic narratives it is so often forced to accompany.
Instead, here are five of those pre-tintinnabuli pieces . And then, once you’ve got your ears around those, I’ve also included another five of Arvo’s finest tintinnabulatory creations, works that you might well know, but perhaps not in their entireties.
Symphony no 1 (1963)
Here’s the piece that will jolt you out of the idea that Pärt’s music can be reduced to a single style or mode of utterance. Modernist but deeply communicative, starkly constructed but speaking with absolute clarity, his first symphony is music of multi-lithic (as opposed to monolithic) power.
Perpetuum mobile (1963)
And here is a four-minute distillation of Pärt’s Soviet-era modernism, which grows with an inescapable and implacable foment of musical momentum.
Cello Concerto: Pro et Contra (1966)
Yes, there may be weird accommodations with and quotations of baroque styles in this piece, but that only throws its granite-hewn textures of gloriously vibrant dissonance into greater relief.
Credo (1968)
The shock here is manifold: firstly, in setting a religious text in Soviet times, in quoting Bach, and in fusing a wild diversity of styles into a 12-minute explosion of musical and spiritual energy. Hear it at the Last Night of the Proms to see what I mean!
Symphony no 3 (1971)
In hindsight, the Third Symphony sounds like a staging-post on the way to the radical simplicity and starkness of Pärt’s most celebrated later music. But it finds an idiom all of its own in an interzone between modernist energy and the meditative resonances of his tintinnabuli pieces.
...and five of his best tintinnabuli works
Für Alina – Pärt’s tintinnabulation in its purest form; Tabula Rasa, his unforgettable double concerto; the choral icons of Passio and the Berliner Messe, and the more recent and orchestrally ambitious Fourth Symphony.
