Dialogues in Music

Concert of the conference “Arvo Pärt: Ideascapes”

Programme:

Arvo Pärt
– Für Alina
– Variations for the Healing of Arinushka
– Partita

Heino Eller
– Pines
– Evening Song in G flat major

Arvo Pärt
– Estonian Lullaby
– Fratres
– Spiegel im Spiegel

Johann Sebastian Bach
– Cello suite No. 2, BWV 1008
Prélude
Sarabande
Menuett I
Menuett II
Gigue

Leopold Brauneiss
– Tranquillo-Giocoso-Sereno. Three pieces for 90 years (premiere)

Arvo Pärt
– Mozart-Adagio

The first day of the 2nd research conference “Arvo Pärt: Ideascapes”, organized by the Arvo Pärt Centre and the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, will conclude with a chamber concert. The outstanding instrumentalists of the younger generation of Estonian musicians, Robert Traksmann, Marcel Johannes Kits and Sten Heinoja, who have also proven themselves as musicians internationally, will perform.

The concert program is inspired by the themes of the conference. Arvo Pärt’s music enters into dialogue, on one hand, with the works of his composition teacher Heino Eller, under whose guidance Pärt wrote his first modernist compositions. It was also from Eller that Pärt absorbed one of his most important ideas: the significance of each individual sound in a composition—an idea that found its most precise expression in his tintinnabuli works.

Further dialogues unfold with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach—the influence of Bach on Pärt is incomparable to that of any other composer, as noted by Christoph Wolff, a renowned Bach scholar and one of the keynote speakers at the conference. A musical tribute to the jubilarian also comes from Austrian Pärt scholar and composer Leopold Brauneiss, with three short pieces dedicated to Arvo Pärt’s 90 years of life.