Arvo Pärt

One of the few composers in my collection who I've actually met, sort of! He attended a Sydney performance of his Passio that my choir was performing -and the 'sort of' refers to the fact that, in total awe of the man as I was, I couldn't bring myself to actually say anything to him: we therefore 'met' three pews away from each other .

He is an Estonian composer, born in Paide, Järva County, which is pretty much right in the middle of the country, in September 1935. From 1940 to 1989, of course, his Estonian identity was crushed by the Soviet Union's occupation of that country, but no-one refers to him as a 'Soviet composer'. The paradox is perhaps exemplified by the fact that Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov/Khrennikov criticised him in 1962 for daring to use serial techniques, but shortly thereafter was awarded first prize in a competition by the all-Union Society of Composers: he was able to preserve an independence of character in the midst of a dominant Soviet musical establishment. At the time of writing, though rapidly approaching his 90th birthday, he is still very much with us …and long may that continue to be the case.

New Groves says of him that, “Boldness and clarity of thought, richness of invention and stylistic mobility are the salient features of his music”. His early works were clearly influenced by Shostakovich and Prokofiev, but from the early 1960s on, he developed a musical personality of his own. An overtly religious work (Credo) in 1968 marked the point of departure from the Soviet authorities: his music was pretty much banned at that point and he spent the next few years re-thinking his musical style and converting from Lutheranism to the Eastern Orthodox faith: much of his time was spent studying old polyphonic forms and harmonies, along with absorbing ideas from Gregorian chant. The result was a 'musical re-awakening' in the mid-1970s, with him wielding a new compositional method of his own devising, called 'tintinabuli' -in which one part sounds arpeggios on a tonic triad whilst another moves in mostly diatonic, step-wise fashion. The works written with this technique are often slow and meditative: the first I remember personally hearing at the Proms in 1977 was his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which to this day I remember finding spell-binding. Another outstanding example of this style is Spiegel im Spiegel.

He is undoubtedly Estonia's most famous composer, though he has said that he 'does not think about these things'. He is also probably one of the world's most-performed contemporary composers, since his music, though deep, is superficially attractive and easy to admire.