{"id":4947,"date":"2013-11-11T12:16:01","date_gmt":"2013-11-11T10:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/maaratlemata-en\/a-concert-off-the-beaten-path-neeme-jarvi-and-other-estonians-at-lincoln-center\/"},"modified":"2022-08-22T07:19:45","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T05:19:45","slug":"a-concert-off-the-beaten-path-neeme-jarvi-and-other-estonians-at-lincoln-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/2013\/11\/a-concert-off-the-beaten-path-neeme-jarvi-and-other-estonians-at-lincoln-center\/","title":{"rendered":"A concert off the beaten path: Neeme J\u00e4rvi and other Estonians at Lincoln Center"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Estonians are a musical people, and in particular a singing people. In fact, they refer to their political stirrings from 1989 to 1991 as \u201cthe Singing Revolution.\u201d (For a piece I did on this subject two years ago, go\u00a0here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Estonians came to Avery Fisher Hall at New York\u2019s Lincoln Center on Sunday afternoon: the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. They were conducted by the veteran Estonian maestro Neeme J\u00e4rvi.<\/p>\n

He is not only a conductor but a patriarch: the father of two conductors, Paavo and Kristjan, and a flutist, Maarika. He led his national orchestra through most of the Sixties and Seventies. Then he came to the West, working in Gothenburg, Detroit, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s concert was part of Lincoln Center\u2019s White Light Festival. The concert had a title: \u201cWord Made Flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n

It began wordlessly, though, with an overture\u2014the Overture No. 2 by Veljo Tormis, written in 1959. Tormis is an Estonian composer, born in 1930. He is not generally a wordless composer, in that he is best known for his choral works. In any event, the Overture No. 2 was a pleasure to hear. It is tense, bracing, exciting. The listener can read, or hear, all sorts of meanings into it. Apparently, the music has to do with Estonia under the Soviets\u2019 boot.<\/p>\n

Under J\u00e4rvi, the Estonian orchestra was amazingly precise. I thought\u2014pardon my bluntness\u2014\u201cIf these nobodies from an obscure corner of the world can do it, why can\u2019t the major orchestras?\u201d<\/p>\n

The concert proceeded with music by Estonia\u2019s master, Arvo P\u00e4rt, who was born in 1935. A few years ago, a reader wrote me, \u201cName me one great composer in the world today, and don\u2019t say Arvo P\u00e4rt!\u201d This was one of the funnier demands I\u2019ve received in recent years.<\/p>\n

The Estonian orchestra and choir performed\u00a0In principio<\/em>, a five-movement work from 2003. It sets John 1:1\u201314, to wit, \u201cIn the beginning was the Word,\u201d etc. The work is declamatory, robust, and somewhat primitive-sounding. It is spare but not bare. It is economical but not anemic. Rests play an important role in this work, as in other compositions by P\u00e4rt. For him, silence is often golden.<\/p>\n

Throughout\u00a0In principio<\/em>, there is a righteous anger. There are bristling, insistent statements. The text and the music are an odd match\u2014but not a mismatch. The performance we heard was, as they say, \u201ca religious experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following this was another, shorter work by P\u00e4rt,\u00a0Da pacem Domine<\/em>, from 2004. It is neo-Baroque, or neo-earlier\u2014neo-Gregorian. It is a beautiful and powerful piece, and when I say \u201cpowerful,\u201d I mean inwardly powerful.<\/p>\n

Immediately after, J\u00e4rvi conducted Mozart\u2019s\u00a0Ave verum corpus<\/em>\u2014and it was as though somebody had turned on a light. What I mean is, the P\u00e4rt piece is in D minor and darkling. The Mozart piece is in D major, and luminous.<\/p>\n

When J\u00e4rvi and his forces were done, the applause was loud and long, and they performed the work again. (It is as short as it is sublime, lasting just a few minutes.) J\u00e4rvi did not conduct the piece in \u201cperiod\u201d fashion; he conducted it in musical fashion. I wager that most critics and scholars would not have liked it. I would wager even more that Mozart would have.<\/p>\n

The crowd certainly did: They went absolutely, rock-concert nuts.<\/p>\n

For years, I have maintained that Neeme J\u00e4rvi is an underrated conductor, though he is a well-known one, and a prolific recorder. He embodies Old World style and Old World values. He brought New York something off the beaten path, in this Sunday-afternoon concert. The Mozart may be on the beaten path\u2014but the Estonian composers, not so much.<\/p>\n

I would have liked to hear\u00a0Ave verum corpus<\/em>\u00a0a third time. And the other pieces again.<\/p>\n

LINK<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Estonians came to Avery Fisher Hall at New York\u2019s Lincoln Center on Sunday afternoon: the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. They were conducted by the veteran Estonian maestro Neeme J\u00e4rvi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2337,"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-4947","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\/4947","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=4947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5436,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4947\/revisions\/5436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erso.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}