Many music lovers might know Arvo Pärt mainly through his choral music, either as one of many devoted Pärt lovers among the listeners, or as one of all the singers that have been fascinated by the seemingly simple, but deceptively complex sounds he builds. Unlike the avant-gardists of the 20th century, Pärt paints with pure, bright colours: triads, suspensions, tension and relaxation that everyone can understand and receive.

However, dismissing the music as simple or banal for this reason would be to do the music and the composer a great disservice. Beneath the surface is a depth and complexity that require thought and awareness from the interpreter; otherwise the music risks becoming a nice surface, but not much else.

Pärt’s compatriot, Estonian conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, has a long-standing and close collaboration with the composer, and has performed many of his works. It is not for nothing that Kaljuste is known as the world’s foremost Pärt expert and interpreter, a person who has really managed to bring out the whole spectrum of colours in the music, beyond its superficial attraction.

Pärt’s earlier works were inspired by neoclassicists like Prokofiev and Bartók on one hand, and on the other by Schönberg, serialism and twelve-tone technique. However, when the Soviet government banned his music – Pärt grew up in the occupied Estonia – and he also found himself in an artistic cul-de-sac, he turned to early Western music, Gregorian song, the Renaissance, and the very oldest polyphony.

These three works – Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, Tabula rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel – are all written after Pärt’s return from his artistic hibernation as a, in some ways, composer reborn. This recording is taken from Baltic Sea Festival 2019, when Kaljuste and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra performed a rich Pärt programme.

Even though Arvo Pärt is the most performed composer of our time, he is no snob or prima donna. In 2007, when he was named an honorary Doctor of Theology at the University of Freiburg, he told a moving story that is typical for Pärt as an individual:

“Some thirty years ago, I sought desperately for someone who could tell me how a composer was able to write music. One day, I met a simple street-sweeper who gave me a remarkable answer: ‘Oh, the composer should probably love every single, tiny sound.’ From that moment on, my musical thoughts moved in a completely new direction. Nothing was the same again.”

David Saulesco