Marking the anniversary of Arvo Pärt

Mahler never wrote any choral a cappella works, and Clytus Gottwald resolved to amend this “error”. Gottwald was born in Silesia in 1925 and by the 1940s was an acclaimed figure of the post-war avant-garde. He loved producing choral transcriptions and, among other works, he created around a dozen arrangements of works by Mahler. These include songs as well as choral and even purely instrumental movements of the composer’s symphonies.
Um Mitternacht is one of five Lieder by Mahler to verse by Rückert; it is a vocal and instrumental elegy, one of Mahler’s greatest philosophical and songful artistic achievements. In part, the song reminds us of the slow movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony (Oh Mensch, gib Acht! Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?). Gottwald’s transcriptions also include a chorus from the fifth movement of the symphony Es sungen drei Engel – a children’s song about heavenly joy from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the song Urlicht – an excerpt from the fourth movement of the Second Symphony to lyrics from the same anthology. The famous Аdagietto from the Fifth Symphony, probably composed as a declaration of love for Alma Schindler, formed the basis of the chorus Im Abendrot to lyrics by Joseph von Eichendorff.

The choral cycle Tag des Jahres by Kaija Saariaho was written to verse by the exalted romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The work was first performed in 2002 by the Tapiola Chamber Chorus as part of the Week of Chamber Choruses in Helsinki.
In his annotation for the work, Saariaho writes that “The idea for Tag des Jahres came to me several years ago, when a close friend suffered a brain haemorrhage – he had a complete lack of sense of time and space, and I had to find new ways of communicating with him... It’s difficult to say what was going on in Hölderlin’s mind when he dated his verse that differ in real time by decades and even centuries and using the name Scardanelli... His verse focusses attention on the present – how it lasts then disappears and becomes transformed into something new. The text demanded an archaic stylistic resolution. I also wished to expand the sound scale in terms of the nature that has great significance in this verse. And so, along with the human voice, the cycle features birdsong, the noise of the wind and other sounds of nature.”

In the 1970s Pärt was experiencing a crisis: disillusioned with the avant-garde, he stopped composing and immersed himself in a study of early music. Once, on hearing a Gregorian chorale, he felt something of a revelation: like a “flash of lightning” came the understanding of “the universal mystery that is hidden in the art of combining “two or three notes.”
Tonnes of paper were used to write out these “two or three notes”, but several years would pass before the crisis reached its end. It was only in the mid 1970s that the composer’s pen began to produce short pieces written in the new technique of tintinnabuli (Latin for “little bells”). The tintinnabuli style was fuelled by the traditions of Gregorian chant, organum and plain chant, though it was not so much a revival of a tradition so much as it was a search for the truth. Pärt found the path to it by rejecting superfluous and maximum concentration: “one must consider every step from one point to the next on sheet music paper... then the sound, which has been subjected to all manner of tests, will be true.”
Summa is one of Pärt’s earliest opuses using the tintinnabuli technique. It was written in 1977 as a choral work to the text of the Catholic Credo. Like baroque composers, Pärt had a passion for transcriptions for various ensembles: that same year, Summa was arranged for end-blown flute quartet and for guitar duet, while in 1991 there came a version for string quartet and strings, and in 2009 there emerged a quartet for saxophones. The name Summa conceals the religious nature of the work – when it was being written, Pärt was still living in the USSR. Pärt’s Magnificat was composed in 1989. The work presents the  tintinnabuli technique in its most refined form. The structure of the work varies from two voices to tutti. The two-voice sections are staggeringly transparent – they consist of a melody against a background of restrained sound in upper voice, and the inclusions of the  tutti create a powerful contrast.
The chorus Woman with the Alabaster Box was composed in honour of the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Karlstad Diocese (Sweden) in 1997. It is based on an extract from the Gospel According to St Mark which tells of the woman who has come to anoint Christ’s feet with peace. Following the “small simple rules” of the tintinnabuli technique, Pärt, as always, amazes his audience: to create such a refined work from just a few notes is an all but impossible task.
Nunc dimittis is a Latin version of the Eastern Christian song Now let Thy servant depart in peace. The hymn is an integral part of both Anglican and Orthodox worship. The chorus was written for the Archbishop of St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh and was performed during vespers at a service which was broadcast by the BBC in 2001.
Yekaterina Yusupova