Paavo Järvi on Arvo Pärt

The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt turned ninety last month, and his compatriot Paavo Järvi (who has known Pärt for most of his life) marked the occasion by recording a collection of his orchestral music with the Estonian Festival Orchestra - including well-known works such as Fratres and the Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten as well as the more recent compositions La sindone and Silhouette (written at Järvi's request for the Orchestra de Paris in 2009). 

The day after a celebratory performance of Summa and Silhouette in Zurich, Järvi spoke to me about his long relationship with the man and his music, how his father Neeme's early advocacy of the Credo led to both composer and conductor being blacklisted by the Soviet authorities, why the popular image of Pärt as a 'monk-like mystic' only tells part of the story, and his own 'holy mission' to champion the work of his compatriots.

How did Arvo Pärt come into your life?

When we lived in Estonia the country was still under Soviet rule, so playing Estonian music was part of a quiet resistance movement against Russification. Plays and literature were supposed to be in Russian, Russian music was programmed above all else, so championing Estonian composers was an important part of reinforcing our national identity. To this day it’s very much a holy mission for me to introduce our country to the wider world through its wonderful composers and musicians.

Estonia is a small and close-knit place in general, but each specific community – artists, musicians, actors etc – are incredibly connected. My father was in the middle of everything, because he was the director of three main organisations: the Estonian National Opera, what is now the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, and the Estonian Chamber Orchestra which he founded in 1963. Arvo Pärt was one of the brightest young voices on the scene, so my father programmed a lot of his music and they became friends. 

Arvo spent a lot of time at our house, and he made a big impression on me because he was so distinctive-looking. He was always bald with long hair and a big beard - exactly like he is now, in fact! I remember him being very thin and wearing a denim jacket and jeans, which was a very exotic thing for us at that time because it was somehow symbolic of the West – the promised land beyond the Iron Curtain, which was off-limits to us. We were so close to Finland, yet we thought we would never be allowed to go there…

Looking back on my childhood, it’s incredible to think of all the illustrious people who were passing through our house on a daily basis: Gilels, Rostropovich, Oistrakh, Rozhdestvensky and Arvīds Jansons (father of Mariss) were all regular visitors, not to mention all the leading Estonian musicians and singers. To my sister and I they were just interchangeable old men, because what does a six-year-old know about the great and the good?! I do remember my father putting his foot down one day and insisting that I met a ‘very important’ visitor instead of going out to play with my sister…I still have the picture which was taken of us all together at our house in Parnu: the guest’s name was Dmitri Shostakovich.

The first performance of Credo was a turning-point in your own family history, as well as in Pärt’s life - do you have any direct memories of that night?

I was too young to go to concerts back then so I don’t remember it directly, but it’s become a kind of legendary story. My father decided to conduct the premiere of Credo at a time when every new piece of music had to be approved by the Commission, who would assess whether it was appropriate for Soviet audiences or was somehow evil Western propaganda. There were very clear guidelines: obviously you couldn’t say anything against the government, but you also weren’t allowed to mention religion. Some of the older Estonian oratorios and requiems from the early or mid-nineteenth century (way before Communism came in) could be performed as long as they were translated into Latin, because the authorities knew that nobody knew the language and wouldn’t understand the Biblical connotations. It seems absurd to us now, but it was a way of life then.

It’s a little surprising that Arvo wasn’t already on the commission’s watchlist, given that the first piece he wrote for full orchestra was called Nekrolog – that’s an obituary, something you write for a corpse, which was a very obvious social commentary. Somehow the commission didn’t see or hear the piece before the premiere, but it was immediately banned because it’s a Credo – a Biblical text. It also used a very obvious collage technique where you juxtapose something very beautiful (in this case a Bach prelude) with free dodecaphonic style: it’s like performance art, highlighting the difference between the good and the bad, the real thing and the fake. Everybody understood that immediately, so the authorities forbade any further performances. 

I don’t know where this courage came from, but my father decided to take full responsibility for doing it again. That was the beginning of the whole process of him and Pärt being blacklisted, and thirteen years later the situation had escalated so much that they both decided to leave the country.

Pärt and his family left Estonia just one week after us, initially moving to Austria and then on to Berlin. He and my father were in contact more than ever, because then performing Estonian music had even more urgency: somehow you become more patriotic when you live away from your country and see things from a distance. Promoting Estonian music became a kind of mission for them both, and that’s something I’ve inherited. And it helps that we happen to have very good composers…

Is it fair to say that he has a rather complicated relationship with his nationality?

This often gets misrepresented - possibly because he’s never really talked about it - but it’s very important to understand that Arvo has never had any ambivalence towards being Estonian. He simply had a problem with the Soviet occupation, as we all did: we dreamt of the day when they’d leave our country. Arvo’s attitude was never ‘Let’s take up arms and fight for our country’– he enacted resistance through his music. One of the things that I was keen to include on this album is a little Estonian lullaby, which shows a side of him that’s often hidden from the public: that’s not Arvo Pärt the Great Mystic, it’s a little piece based on a folk-tune. 

His religion is Russian Orthodox, but again it’s a very personal thing: he’ll never talk about it, even in private. His religious enlightenment happened during the time when he was silent musically – there was a period after the Third Symphony where he basically stopped writing. He realised there was no point in composing that kind of music, so he withdrew and did other things: he worked as a sound engineer in radio and also wrote a lot of children’s film music and little things which are still played in Estonia.

Then he came back with that quiet, introverted tintinnabuli style which he created. It was born out of a process of evaluating himself and life in general: why are we so loud, why are we shouting about things that mean nothing when making noise that doesn’t do any good anyway. Why not say less, but with more meaning - or say nothing at all? 

Arvo has a very large range, and I really wanted to show that on the album. Of course his most popular pieces are the atmospheric and meditative ones, like Tabula rasa and the Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. But I think people often forget that he also wrote a lot of secular pieces like Swansong and Silhouette, which are worlds away from the tintinnabuli style – they sound more ‘modern’ than some pieces written by composers who have Avant-garde reputations. Not all his stuff has a religious, otherworldly atmosphere – a lot of it’s very down-to-earth. That monk-like image is partly true, but it’s not all there is to Arvo: his eyes are always sparkling, looking for a joke. 

You commissioned Silhouette yourself - how did the piece evolve?

When I was at the Orchestre de Paris I asked Arvo to write a piece for us, as part of my mission to bring Estonian music to a wider audience…As every person who has ever tried to commission anything from him will tell you, the first response is always an immediate No. He’ll tell you he’s busy with other commissions, he’s going to stop composing soon anyway etc etc. The answer was No for quite a while, but I kept bringing it up gently in conversation. I remember saying ‘Is there anything that excites you about French culture or about Paris itself? Its literature, culture, music, art, architecture…anything at all?!’. All I got back was ‘Not really’!

Then one day he invited me to his apartment in Tallinn, and there on his desk was a huge book collecting together everything that’s ever been written about the Eiffel Tower: all the correspondence, blueprints, financial information, the lot! He was very excited and played me the piece on the piano: I remember him saying ‘Look, here is a strong structure - but it has no walls’. He was so inspired by the idea of having all these different levels, with the air getting thinner as you rise, until you’re so high that you can see the clouds passing through. And sometimes the whole structure is enveloped in fog and cloud so that you just see the silhouette, which is where the name comes from.

At times you hear this eerie metallic sound, because tall buildings always sway. He creates that at the very beginning of the piece, by having a tam-tam played with a bow. Every time I perform it I find new things, especially in terms of the sounds he gets out of the percussion: he uses all sorts of special effects, like having vibraphones which are bowed rather than played with a mallet. Arvo is a real master of orchestration, which a lot of people don’t realise. He’s extremely sensitive to combinations of sounds, and it was a privilege to have him there for our rehearsals in Paris.

How is he in rehearsal?

Complicated! All Estonian musicians know that when Arvo comes along they’re going to be experimenting with one note for twenty minutes, and he has every right to do that because he knows exactly what he wants. 

Arvo’s music is very challenging to rehearse and perform, because there’s so little to hide behind. I think there’s a misconception that difficult music = lots of notes and tricky rhythms, when in fact those are just technical things that you need to perfect. But if you have three notes and a lot of rests in between, that’s where it gets really complicated: you have to create an atmosphere, figure out why they belong together and forge some sort of musical logic and continuity…

It’s also about the meter – you might look at his music on the page and think ‘Ah it’s in 4/4, easy!’. But it doesn’t usually work if you just count it: the timing has to be collectively felt, which means that you have to be much more open to the layer that lies beneath the purely mechanical one. And that’s where the real music starts anyway…

Tell me a little more about La Sindone (‘The Shroud’), which was commissioned for the Turin Winter Olympics…

The first performance was in Turin, but we gave the Estonian premiere at my festival in Parnu and Arvo went through the score with me note-by-note - I still have the recording on my phone. It’s a graphic depiction of the Deposition from the Cross: you hear the voices of the women caretakers, the removal of each nail and ultimately of the Shroud itself. Once you know the story you hear exactly what’s going on, but the piece also works well without that context.

Arvo has never discussed this, but I consider this sort of music to be the third stage in his career: the first period was the Avant-garde, the second was the tintinnabuli, and for me the third is this New Romanticism. It’s not remote, monk-like music - it’s very expressive and visceral. It feels like these latest pieces like Silhouette and Swansong sit within the tradition of the tone-poem (swans are very important for us Nordic people, as we see in Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela). 

Was there a concert to mark his ninetieth birthday?

No, nobody expects him to come to concerts anymore; we’re all just happy he’s in good health and doing well. He was never comfortable with being in the public eye anyway, but at ninety he’s taking it easy!