Arvo Part

It’s Arvo Part’s 90th birthday year, which is good news if you like your minimalism glum, low and very, very slow. Lots of people seem to. The London Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday night was a reminder of an earlier, less ingratiating Part: the dissident composer in Soviet-controlled Estonia. Hannu Lintu revived Part’s First Symphony of 1963, and there’s nothing remotely minimal about its opening. There’s a swagger of brass, machine rhythms and an onslaught of string chords in which the dissonances don’t feel aggressive so much as mischievous. This is a young composer taking a manic glee in piling on the wrong notes just because he can.

This year marks the forty-fifth anniversary of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres — one of a series of groundbreaking compositions that Pärt wrote between 1976 and 1978 using his tintinnabuli style. Most of Pärt’s works in this compositional style, which means “little bells,” are in two voices — usually one a triad and the other a melody — which are played in such a way as to create an underlying drone. This creates a piece of music that is both concrete (single notes ring out clearly) and ephemeral. We see this in pieces like Für Alina (1976), Fratres (1977) and Spiegel im Spiegel (1978). Pärt was born in Estonia and grew up in the Soviet Union, but was influenced by twelve-tone serialists like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.