Concert of the musicAeterna Choir: Kurtag. Pärt

The programme of the musicAeterna Orchestra and Choir soloists, conducted by Teodor Currentzis, consists of major works by two contemporary composers, Hungarian master György Kurtág and Estonian master Arvo Pärt.

György Kurtág is undeniably a major figure in European music of the 20th and the 21st centuries. Few of his contemporaries have managed to find the same degree of individuality of expression, as well as a similar balance of severe self-restraint and freedom in dealing with the entire legacy of European music from Machaut to Beethoven, and from Stravinsky to Stockhausen. György Kurtág's music is both expressive and ascetic, full of secret messages to friends and composers of the past, dramatic in a theatrical sense – that is the degree to which the gestures are so sharp and eloquent.

Among the composer's favourite genre titles are 'requiem', 'tombstone', 'dedication', 'farewell'. The work on the cycle Songs of Despair and Sorrow for choir and instruments was started in 1980 and completed only in 1994. Six poems by Russian poets from Lermontov to Tsvetaeva selected by Kurtág treat the same theme in different ways, but with equal desperation – a man (the author) in the face of impending non-existence. The score includes rare instrumental timbres – a celesta, two harmoniums, four bayans, and a huge percussion group.

Arvo Pärt is an Estonian classic of the 20th and the 21st centuries. Having abandoned the musical radicalism of his youth, the composer developed his own language, bringing him closer to the minimalists, but based on his own original compositional technique, which Pärt himself called tintinnabuli, 'the method of bells.'

Miserere for soloists, choir and instrumental ensemble is one of the composer's fundamental works. The half an hour piece, completed in 1989, dramatically juxtaposes the texts of Psalm 51 and eight stanzas from the medieval sequence hymn Dies irae (Day of Wrath). Psalm 51 is performed slowly and quietly by an ensemble of soloists, with pauses separating each word from another. The composer explained this principle as follows, 'There is one breath for each word, as though after pronouncing each word one has to gather one’s strength for the next word. It's a chain that intertwines breaths and exhalations, hope and despair.' In the furious middle part of the composition, the Dies irae section, Pärt creates the effect of 'structured chaos' using the medieval technique of prolation canon, where the same theme is carried out at five different tempos. Following the question from the seventh stanza of Dies irae, 'What then shall I, unhappy man, allege? Whom shall I invoke as protector? When even the just shall hardly be secure?', the penitential psalm continues. In the finale, the eighth stanza of Dies irae sounds – contrary to the centuries-old tradition, the composer interprets it as an answered prayer, a promise of reconciliation with God.