Arvo Pärt - Almeida Festival (10.6.86)

Imagine the scene.  A boy grows up in the small town of Rakvere in Estonia.  Although he has taken piano lessons, he has never heard an orchestra.  Until one day, when he discovers that recordings of classical music are sometimes played over the public address system in the town square.  Hungry for music, he cycles round and round the square mesmerised by the new sounds which emerge, however imperfectly.  That square becomes his childhood and his life.

It is the story of Arvo Pärt.  If it sounds like a scene from some obscure and small-scale film, this is probably appropriate.  First, because like most professional composers in the Soviet Union, Pärt has survived by writing film music - some 50 scores in all.  But more revealingly, because a particular practitioner of Soviet cinema is constantly evoked in this noble and melancholy music: Tarkovsky.

It is easy to imagine all of Pärt's pieces as soundtracks for specific films. Thus the powerful evocation of the millennial Orthodox Church in the Te Deum could serve as a fitting counterpoint to any of the mystical scenes of Andrei Rublev - Pärt himself looks like some meeker, more saintly version of Rublev; and the music of the Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, which constantly slips away like so many small tears, seems at one with much of Tarkovsky's extended and central scenes of rain and flowing water.

But the key film has to be Nostalghia.  In fact just as an unsayable longing for the evanescent past permeates Tarkovsky's whole output, so Pärt's music seems a constant meditation on something infinitely sad and unassuageable; something located far back in the memory; and as such something deeply treasured.

Partly this has to do with the idiom employed. Throughout, it is tonal, often modal, but with layer upon layer of added notes, and poignant minor seconds.  It seems to draw on standard elements like the Orthodox liturgy and Estonian folk inflections, along with other half-remembered musical memories, but everything is covered in a thick varnish of Pärt's own musical presence which subsumes it, like an old master's bright colours dimmed with time and even out to a rich glow.  But it goes deeper than this.  Like Tarkovsky, it is almost as if Pärt needed self-imposed exile; he needed to be cast out of paradise the better to mourn it, and more crucially, to validate that mourning.

Perhaps the fullest coming-together of all these elements is Tabula Rasa. This extended meditation on baroque concerto techniques turns into a deeply moving refraction of tiny motifs, each insignificant in itself, but layered as here with subtle pointing from the string orchestra, it becomes as obsessive as a tune recalled from childhood.  And perhaps that is what we have here. With the constant circling of melodies, the use of the prepared piano's broken and liquid tones emphasising the overall effect of distance, we seem to be back in Rakvere, hearing with Pärt's ears the haunting, strange music as it swooped around him time and time again.
 
(10.6.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Nostalghia For Bagno Vignoni

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