November 2017

Pope Francis presented the Ratzinger Prizes on 18 November at the award ceremony in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. In addition to two outstanding theologians the winners of this year’s Prize also included the composer Arvo Pärt.

The exhibition TABULA – Arvo Pärt Centre by Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano, the architects of the Arvo Pärt Centre, will be opened on 8 December in Berlin’s prestigious Aedes Architekturforum, where it will introduce the architecture and conceptual points of departure for the new Arvo Pärt Centre building. The exhibition will be on view until 16 January 2018.

The Estonian cellist Toomas Velmet recently celebrated his 75th birthday. On that occasion, the ERP record company released Velmet’s record Contra aut pro?. Released as an LP, the collection features eight recordings from 1967 to 1992 stored in the Estonian Radio archives. The LP features Arvo Pärt’s cello concerto Pro et contra (1966) recorded in 1967.

In the second half of 2017, three scientific studies have been published on Arvo Pärt’s work and its reception: Arvo Pärt’s White Light, a collection of articles edited by Laura Dolp, Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, a monograph by Kevin Karnes, and Arvo Pärt’s Resonant Texts, a monograph by Andrew Shenton. All three books were published by the prestigious publishing houses of the universities of Cambridge and Oxford.