Pärt in the pantry: Estonian composer’s music opens ACM’s newly converted venue
The renowned Estonian composer Arvo Pärt turned 90 last week and classical musicians near and far are celebrating that important milestone with a spate of concerts and other observances. The heavy hitters of the Chicago music establishment have yet to be heard from; so, for now, it has fallen to adventuresome outliers such as Access Contemporary Music to lead the charge.
The Chicago nonprofit music school did so admirably with an all-Pärt chamber concert Sunday evening at The CheckOut, a new Off Loop venue that opened its doors earlier this month.
A converted former 7-Eleven store in the Lakeview area, The CheckOut houses a 60-seat performance space, teaching rooms and a bar. Sunday marked the first of two Pärt concerts included in an opening festival of 12 contemporary classical, jazz and cabaret concerts throughout September, highlighted by the premieres of a dozen new pieces commissioned by ACM and performed by local soloists and chamber groups.
The Nova Linea Music Stage, as the bare-box space is called, has exposed ductwork and fluorescent lighting in the ceiling, with a sonic clarity and immediacy that suited a communal event such as this. If the room dimensions made it feel rather like the performers were sitting in the laps of their listeners, Pärt might well have approved.
The fact that Sunday’s event could attract a capacity audience suggested the cult status Pärt and his music have attained globally; indeed, he may be the world’s most widely performed living composer—a close second to John Williams, according to recent polls. His works live in Hollywood, the theater and in graphic novels, and if he no longer is said to be composing, he can take satisfaction in having taken on the celebrity of a pop star.
Almost all the music Pärt has written over the last half-century has been couched in what he calls his tintinnabuli style—music of spare, austere simplicity and stasis, stripped down to the barest of essentials. Its meditative serenity, radiant beauty and timeless spirituality draw on a triad-based harmonic language as much redolent of the 15th century as the 21st. Sunday’s program of instrumental and vocal chamber pieces drew on such pieces.
Performing this music well requires a kind of selflessness by the performers that goes beyond merely playing the notes accurately. This is its real difficulty and it cannot be said that Sunday’s well-intentioned performers got everything right—there were passing intonation problems, especially in the two vocal works (Pärt’s setting of the Robert Burns poem “My Heart’s in the Highlands” and Sarah Was 90 Years Old), which sometimes broke the hypnotic effect so crucial to the composer’s hermitic sound world.
At the heart of the soldout program were two of Pärt’s greatest hits, Summa and Fratres, along with a more recent piece, Da pacem Domine, all played in the composer’s arrangements for string quartet.
In Summa the sense of aural stasis created by the circling, crossing and intertwining of the melodic lines of the four string players was compelling, as were the rising and falling tones of Fratres, moving in ritualistic calm, plucked notes marking the divisions between variants.
In place of the announced Spiegel im Spiegel was Da pacem Domine, a prayer for peace that had been commissioned by the early-music specialist Jordi Savall to honor victims of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Originally set for four voices, the piece exists in several versions, including this one for four strings. Here any sense of melody or harmonic change is more implied than actual, yet one came away affected by its five minutes of elegiac calm.
The rigorous sparseness of texture of Pärt’s Robert Burns setting combined with tenor Jonathan Zeng’s pure-toned delivery, over bare organ chords (Matt Mason) to make sure each word of the familiar poem emerged with crystalline clarity: not a whit of Scottish flavor here, just compact vocal-instrumental ritual.
My Heart’s in the Highlands came off better than the longer Sarah Was 90 Years Old, a wordless piece for three voices and percussion in which words from Genesis become an analogue to music of minimalist ritual expressed in two alternating textures. The first, a solemn beating of drums, intensifies at each repetition while the second, couched in a neo-Gothic-polyphonic style, is marked by canonic intertwining of voices tinged with passing dissonances. Here the vocal component was rather variable in quality.
In addition to the musicians already mentioned, the capable roster included Suzanne Hannau, soprano; Andy Zapata, tenor; Kenneth Dulay, countertenor; and a string quartet consisting of Henry Zheng and Kathleen Carter, violins; Traci Huff, viola, and Alyson Berger, cello.
The Pärt program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. September 20 at The CheckOut, 4116 N. Clark St. The venue’s opening festival runs through Sept. 28. thecheckout.org, acmusic.org
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