Arvo Pärt
Complete Symphonies
Iceland Symphony Orchestra/Eva Ollikainen
Chandos CHSA5372 76:48 mins
From card-carrying serialist to politically engaged lyricist, Arvo Pärt’s transformation is one of music’s great mysteries, and this album illustrates the stages of that process.
As Paul Griffiths points out in his scholarly programme note, Pärt’s First Symphony was composed at a time when he knocked about with Luigi Nono and got to know the music of Penderecki and Kagel. And that symphony, though playful, was an academic exercise in the manipulation of canons which makes the brain reel – well, it does mine.
Composed in 1966, Pärt’s Second Symphony opens serially, with skittering pizzicati and long stretches of anguish on brass and horn, but in the distance, one also hears children playing. And finally, something extraordinary happens: led by a drum, the strings march off into the distance, leaving a general cacophony which makes way for a demure account of ‘Sweet dreams’ from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album. We are told that Pärt sees that quotation as ‘a ray of sunshine that brings in another world, other values, the pure sound of a child’.
While writing film scores to get by, Pärt continued his quest with a Third Symphony permeated by Russian chant and medieval music, on which he later commented: ‘I had succeeded in building a bridge within myself between yesterday and today – a yesterday that was seven centuries old, and this encouraged me to go on exploring’.
Immaculately played by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the first movement of the Fourth (‘Los Angeles’) Symphony – which is dedicated to the man who is the biggest thorn in Putin’s side, the Russian political prisoner and entrepreneur Mikhail Khodorkovsky – is strongly reminiscent of Pärt’s 1977 masterpiece Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, with the same texture and heartfelt pulse. The pupa has emerged as a beautiful butterfly.
