The Sound of Spirit – Arvo Pärt in NY Times

In case you missed it, Arvo Part was featured in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago.  With a new job and busier life than ever, I've missed bringing it to your attention:

Last month, Pärt marked his 75th birthday, and the event was celebrated with a festival of his music throughout Estonia, where, says the younger Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur, he is “a living legend.” There were performances of recent as well as familiar pieces, a reminder that Pärt, an energetic man with a reedy voice, loping gait and erect posture, shows few signs of slowing down. ECM New Series, which was inaugurated 26 years ago with his breakthrough work “Tabula Rasa,” likewise balanced the old and new, releasing a first recording of Pärt’s Fourth Symphony (which was premiered in 2009 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic) and preparing to issue a deluxe commemorative edition of “Tabula Rasa” in December. This year, Pärt’s major new work is “Adam’s Lament,” a 25-minute piece for string orchestra and chorus, based on an old Russian text. (“Adam’s Lament” will have its first North American performance next month in New York, as part of the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center.)

In one birthday-festival concert that I attended, in an old church in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, a long-stemmed red rose was handed to each of the players and then to the composer, who bounded up to the stage, playfully bopping the heads of the musicians with his floral baton. Belying his mythologized public reputation as solemn and monklike, Pärt disarmingly blends the antic with the earnest. Before we met, I could comprehend the impulse to cast him in a religious mold (although for me, with his aquiline nose, furrowed brow and gray-flecked black beard, a different holy prototype comes to mind — one of the apostles as painted by Tintoretto). Appearance notwithstanding, he is neither an ascetic nor a recluse. “He’s a man of the world,” says Manfred Eicher, the ECM founder and record producer, who is his close friend. “He is very centered. He knows exactly what he wants and doesn’t want.”

He is also forthright on worldly matters that he deems important. He dedicated the Fourth Symphony last year to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was an oil oligarch before he ran afoul of Vladimir Putin, the former president and current premier of Russia; since 2003, Khodorkovsky has been imprisoned for fraud and tax evasion. And after the murder, in October 2006, of the outspoken investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose articles embarrassed both Putin and the pro-Moscow government in Chechnya, Pärt declared that all concerts of his music that season would be performed in her memory. He volunteered to me that he knew that in making such gestures he was venturing outside his recognized bailiwick. “I am not a politician; I’m a dilettante,” he said. “But this is the normal thinking of people who came through this Soviet hell.”

Read the whole thing here.