Arvo Pärt at 90

Summary

In many ways Arvo Pärt and John Williams’s music couldn’t be further apart. One celebrates simplicity, purity, and draws much of its inspiration from sacred texts; the other captures strong emotions in sweeping orchestral scores. And yet the two men are today’s most performed contemporary composers. Bachtrack’s annual survey of classical music performed across the world placed Pärt second (John Williams is in the top spot) in 2023 and 2024. In 2022, Pärt was first, Williams second. This year, Pärt might return to No 1 as concert halls and festivals worldwide celebrate his 90th birthday, on 11 September.Unlike many of his contemporaries, Pärt has found a way to speak across boundaries of culture, creed and generation. In the world of contemporary classical music, where complexity and empty virtuosity often dominate, Pärt stands apart. His music eschews spectacle in favour of silence, simplicity and spiritual depth. Pärt has outlasted political regimes, artistic fashions and shifting trends in composition, yet his work remains strikingly relevant. In a cultural moment saturated with information and spectacle, Pärt offers something almost universally appealing. As the commentator Alex Ross observed in a 2002 New Yorker article, Pärt has “put his finger on something almost impossible to put into words, something to do with the power of music to obliterate the rigidities of space and time [and] silence the noise of self, binding the mind to an eternal present.”Pärt’s early career unfolded under Soviet rule, which shaped much of his emerging artistic trajectory. Trained at Tallinn Conservatory in Estonia, he began composing in a modernist idiom, experimenting with serialism and collage techniques in the 1960s – often to the dismay of Soviet authorities who sought artistic control over the creative process. Works such as Nekrolog (1960), the first 12-tone piece written in Estonia, and the avant garde Credo (1968), which juxtaposed Bach with a compendium of avant-garde tech...