The overviews provided by festivals and retrospectives are always interesting for the juxtapositions they throw up and the connections they reveal.
There were many Arvo Pärts on show at last weekend's RTÉ Living Music Festival. Estonia's most famous living composer is now known for a series of spare, serene works, mostly written for choir, and a handful of instrumental works in the same manner, with many of the instrumental pieces existing in a long list of arrangements.
The familiar Pärt emerged only in the mid-1970s, when the composer was already over 40. The Living Music Festival, with Scottish composer James MacMillan as this year's artistic director, took listeners on a trip that reached back to the music of the 1960s.
The Collage on B-A-C-H (1964) and Credo (1968) are both Bach-derived pieces which use collage techniques to confront the purity and clarity of Bach with the dissonant conflict of the modern world. The manner is quite crude, at the opposite end of the scale to the sophistication of, say, the multi-faceted quotations of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia.
The crudeness can still carry a potent 1960s charge, however, as it did in Tõnu Kaljuste's handling of Credo with the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir and NSO, and Fergal Caulfield the valiantly exposed orchestral pianist carrying the great Bachian burden.
The boldness and bluntness of the early work can perhaps be related to the fearlessness of the later Pärt, especially when it comes to the paring back of resources. Pärt is happy to work with the plainest of material, enclosing simple scales with triadic arpeggios over and over again and treating this monastic musical cuisine as something that needs nothing in the way of unusual condiments to sustain its interest or flavour. He does, of course, ring the changes within his defined parameters, working out patterns that have the inescapable ring of inevitability.
His Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem (1982) is a Latin setting of chapters 18 and 19 of the Gospel of St John, for choir and small instrumental ensemble, with combinations from within a vocal quartet singing the words of the Evangelist, and solo parts for Jesus and Pilate. The passion settings of Bach are an indulgent riot of colour, movement and material by comparison.
The Passio was heard at Christ Church Cathedral on Saturday evening, in a performance of intense focus, with the Hilliard Ensemble and the National Chamber Choir under Sarah Tennant-Flowers, and bass Steven Harrold as an always arrestingly grave Jesus. The performance was hugely impressive, the musical experience oddly less so. For me, it was as if the austerity of the idiom were being followed for its own sake, well beyond the point of actual musical reward.
It's no accident that Pärt's most popular works, whether choral (as heard in Saturday's lunchtime concert by the excellent Polyphony under Stephen Layton), chamber (as heard from the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet and the Crash Ensemble) or orchestral (the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under David Brophy got the pick of the crop) find ways of securing a wider range of harmonic glow and rather more in the way of contrast and tension than offered in the hairshirt world of Passio.
Among the surprises in the festival programme were the rarely heard Wenn Bach Bienen gezüchtet hätte (If Bach had been a beekeeper), a piece which evokes what its title suggests and shows a witty and almost whimsical side to the composer's make-up.
The festival opened with a performance by Joanna MacGregor and the NSO under Kaljuste of the death-obsessed Lamentate, written for piano and orchestra in 2002 and subtitled Homage to Anish Kapoor and his sculpture Marsyas. This is the composer's longest orchestral work, and is anything but concerto-like in its dark and often harshly oppressive conception.
The NSO programme also included a vivid depiction of the perils of Pärt's spareness. The Berliner Messe with the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir was a performance where we got the notes but not the music and, sadly, the Crash Ensemble's performance of the Stabat Mater under Fergus Sheil in the inhospitable acoustic of TCD's Samuel Beckett Theatre went the same way, in spite of the vocal beauty of the three singers.
The festival's focus on Pärt was tight and cogent, but room was found for pieces by a handful of other composers. Alfred Schnittke's piercing Piano Quintet was given by MacGregor with the Vanbrugh Quartet. A trio of Dutch composers sounded like intruders who made it to the wrong party in the Crash programme.
Irish composer David Fennessy, who's been working outside Ireland for the last 10 years, had his slow-burning, at times almost tortured This is how it feels (Another Bolero) heard in a confidently paced performance by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under an insightful David Brophy. - Michael Dervan
