One of the most important composers of our time, Arvo Pärt was born in the historic town of Paide in central Estonia in 1935. He studied at the Tallinn State Conservatory and then worked as a sound engineer in the music department of Estonian State Radio from 1958 to 1967, before becoming a full-time composer.

Pärt's unique musical style of tintinnabuli (bell chime), developed in 1976, opened up new perspectives in contemporary music. His first tintinnabuli works were completed and premiered in Tallinn, Estonia, then still part of the Soviet Union. Like the avant-garde spirit of Pärt's early works, the religious dimension of his tintinnabuli works led to increasingly controversial reviews and confrontations with the Soviet authorities. In January 1980, Pärt and his family were forced to make the decision to leave their homeland and move to Vienna.

A year later, Pärt was awarded the prestigious DAAD academic scholarship. This enabled the family to move to Berlin, where they lived for almost 30 years. Pärt returned to his home country in 2010. In the same year, the Arvo Pärt Centre was founded in Laulasmaa, near Tallinn, where the composer's personal archive is housed.

The programme of Arvo Pärt's anniversary concert brings together choral and orchestral works composed or arranged by him over the past 25 years. The first half of the concert will feature orchestral works, typically based on Pärt's literary sources. Many of his orchestral works have texts written down word for word, even though they are not sung or recited.

The opening Für Lennart in memoriam was written at the request of Lennart Mere, former President of Estonia. Pärt and Meri were colleagues at Eesti Radio, where Meri worked in the radio's theatre department. Lennart Meri, who died in March 2006, wanted Pärt's music to be played at his memorial service. The memorial work for string orchestra is based on a canon for mixed choir a cappella composed by Pärt in 1997, with a text in Church Slavonic that refers to the sea and includes a short prayer for the dead by Archimandrite Sophrony (1896-1993).

The second work in the concert, Orient & Occident, is also based on a text in Church Slavonic. The Creed is common to the Masses of the Western and Eastern Churches, and in this music these contrasting worlds intertwine. The work was commissioned by the Berlin Music Festival and premiered in 2000.

Mein Weg hat Gipfel und Wellentäler (My Way has peaks and valley bottoms), written for the Parainen Organ Days in 1989 and dedicated to organist Kari Jussila, was shortened for strings and percussion in 1995 by Pärt. The title of the original work is borrowed from a collection of poems in French by the Jewish writer Edmond Jabès (1912-1991), Le Livre des questions (The Book of Questions, 1963). The poem deals with the course of life with its ups and downs.

La Sindone refers to the Shroud of Turin, in which Christ's body was believed to have been wrapped. The mystical shroud, preserved in Turin Cathedral, is one of the most important Christian relics. The original version of the work, which explores the death of Christ and the religious mystery, was written for the SettembreMusica festival in Turin to be performed as part of the cultural programme of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin.

The choral work The Deer's Cry is based on a text by St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, from the fifth century. Legend has it that St Patrick and the monks who followed him recited the sacred lorica prayer of protection as they passed through a dark forest. Lorica is a prayer whose name means armour or breastplate. God answered the prayer by letting the enemies see the deer antlers and calves instead of the wanderers, and so the party was saved from ambush and probable death.

The concert will conclude with one of Pärt's most important works, Adam's Lament, based on a prose text by the monk Silouan Athonilaeus (1866-1938). The text, which has been an important inspiration for Pärt for decades, was compiled into a book by Archimandrite Sophrony, to whom the work is dedicated. In the poetic text, Pärt refers to Adam as the ancestor of all humanity. Adam laments the betrayal of his Creator, the loss of God's love and paradise.

"But who is this exiled Adam? We could say he is in all of us, in all the people who bear his legacy. And this all Adam has mourned on earth for thousands of years. Our primordial Adam foresaw the tragedy of humanity and felt personal guilt about it. He has suffered all the upheavals of humanity, to the point of the deepest despair", Arvo Pärt writes.

Love and humility, the pervading themes of St Silouan's writings, have also influenced Arvo Pärt's world view. The idea of a work, which had been in Pärt's mind since the late 1980s, was realised at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Turkey in 2010. Adam's Lament was co-commissioned by two cultural capitals, Istanbul and Tallinn, and premiered in the former Hagia Irene Church in Istanbul, which has been converted into a concert hall.

Adam's Lament is one of Arvo Pärt's major works. The structure of the text has dictated the musical solutions down to the smallest detail. The punctuation, the number of syllables and the emphasis of the words all play an important role in this tintinnabuli composition for choir and orchestra.

Written by Hannele Eklund
www.arvopart.ee

The translations are AI-aided