{"id":4899,"date":"2012-02-13T09:25:29","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T07:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/maaratlemata-en\/chiming-bells-and-mysteries\/"},"modified":"2022-08-22T07:19:54","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T05:19:54","slug":"chiming-bells-and-mysteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/2012\/02\/chiming-bells-and-mysteries\/","title":{"rendered":"Chiming Bells and Mysteries"},"content":{"rendered":"
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P\u00e4rt and Mozart performed by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (ERSO) and the Philharmonic Chamber Choir at the Estonia Concert Hall on February 10 made for a sublime experience.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

ERSO\u2019s program of music last Friday night took concertgoers from the prosaic monotony of our everyday lives to special, transcendent realms. I\u2019m not just saying this; it really happened. And it happened because the music that was performed was uniquely deep and the stuff of genius.<\/p>\n

The first half of the concert was two pieces from Estonia\u2019s most famous son, Arvo P\u00e4rt. Whenever P\u00e4rt\u2019s music is performed you can expect to be transported, forget your physical self, and move into worlds of perfect form and divine consonance.<\/p>\n

What takes listeners away is P\u00e4rt\u2019s compositional technique, the famous tintinnabuli<\/em> (Latin for \u2018bells\u2019). Invented and developed by P\u00e4rt in the 1970\u2019s, tintinnabuli was the musical space that he was looking for in what had been found to be to the dead-end of modern composition. He arrived there by looking back at medieval and Renaissance music and especially Gregorian chant. Using ressourcement,<\/em> he returned to the musical past as a creative wellspring in the sense of discovering hidden possibilities and roads not taken.<\/p>\n

Here in the bedrock of early music he plied the irreducible. The music he created was stripped of all superfluity. It became mathematical in its simple beauty using the building blocks of music as modes of expression in themselves. His method takes notes of melody and pairs them with a harmonizing chord. P\u00e4rt\u2019s soundscape has been compared to Pythagorean geometry, but from this world of narrowed musical space emerges, rather miraculously, something very spiritual.<\/p>\n

The program started with P\u00e4rt\u2019s \u201cIn Spe\u201d (In Hope). It is an instrumental reworking for wind quintet and string orchestra of a choral arrangement from the late 70\u2019s, \u201cAn den Wassern zu Babel\u201d (By the Rivers of Babylon) that was premiered in Wales last year for P\u00e4rt\u2019s 75th birthday celebration. This was the Estonian premiere. Coming in at eight minutes, this is as an intensely emotional piece of music as you\u2019re likely to hear. It has an extraordinarily distilled and compressed quality. Looking at the faces of concertgoers told me a lot about what I was feeling; the audience appeared spellbound and the world that tintinnabuli opens up is where we were. If you have not heard this work – and most people haven\u2019t because it is new – find it online and listen. It is amazing.<\/p>\n

Another new piece from P\u00e4rt followed, \u201cAdam\u2019s Lament\u201d which is a choral meditation in Russian on mankind\u2019s search for renewal. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir accompanied ERSO for this stirring work with gorgeous, powerful singing.<\/p>\n

The powerful singing continued after the break with Mozart\u2019s enigmatic \u201cRequiem\u201d. Four vocal soloists joined the symphony and choir under Daniel Reuss, who is the choir\u2019s principle conductor and artistic director. The mysteriously commissioned \u201cRequiem\u201d would be Mozart\u2019s last work and he left it unfinished struggling against a deadline in more ways than one. He was reported to have said at the time that he was writing the work for his own funeral, and so it was. The first performance was for a memorial in his honor to benefit his wife Constance.<\/p>\n

This \u201cRequiem\u201d was a potent affair with a particularly soaring effort from soprano K\u00e4dy Plaas. In the end it was a sublime night of music; a celebration of the immutable against the transient, which is so often emphasized nowadays.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/news.err.ee\/culture\/e4f9c567-9e5c-4557-a78f-64a787908afb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

P\u00e4rt and Mozart performed by the ERSO and the EPCC on February 10 made for a sublime experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1989,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-reviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5462,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4899\/revisions\/5462"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}