Estonian Festival Orchestra Perform at Carnegie Hall
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 04 November 2025 15:38
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Fadi Kheir
At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Thursday, October 23rd, I had the privilege to attend a superb concert presented by Carnegie Hall, devoted to the music of Arvo Pärt, and featuring the extraordinary Estonian Festival Orchestra, under the expert direction of Paavo Järvi.
The event began strongly with a sterling realization of one of the composer’s most popular and beautiful works, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, originally written in 1977 and revised in 1980–it very slowly builds to a kind of apotheosis. This was followed by Perpetuum mobile from 1963, a surprisingly rewarding piece from Pärt’s seldom encountered pre-minimalist, serialist phase—its structuring principle of an extended crescendo provides an unexpected anticipation of that of Cantus, although the older piece attains a more shattering climax.
The next work, La Sindone, originally composed in 2005 and then revised in 2022, was also remarkable—as well as mysterious and transcendent in effect, like many of the pieces in the concert. It is, according to the program notes by Peter Bouteneff, “a musical reflection on the theme of the Shroud (Sindone in Italian) of Turin.” The first half of the evening closed with the powerful Adam’s Lament from 2009, which here featured the marvelous Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, directed by Tõnu Kaljuste. (It is set to a text—a “meditation on Adam,” according to the annotator—by the Russian Orthodox St. Silouan the Athonite.)
The second half of the event was also outstanding, starting with the haunting, very famous Tabula rasa from 1977, featuring the violinists Hans Christian Aavik and the celebrated Midori, as well as the eminent composer Nico Muhly on prepared piano. The first movement, Ludus, is one of increasing intensity, while the second, Silentium, is more purely meditative and contrastingly structured as a diminuendo. Enthusiastic applause elicited a beautiful encore from the violinists and the ensemble: Pärt’s Passacaglia.
The brilliant Fratres, which was played immediately after, is another one of Pärt’s most familiar pieces, while the succeeding Swansong from 2013 is according to the annotator, an “orchestral setting of an earlier sung composition (Littlemore Tractus, 2000),” which is based on a prayer by Cardinal John Henry Newman. The program proper closed forcefully with its most challenging work, the often raucous Credo from 1968, which also featured the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Trinity Choir, and Muhly on piano; Bouteneff records that, “The chords of Bach’s Prelude in C Major open the composition, and they return in different forms.” A standing ovation drew forth another marvelous encore, Pärt’s Estonian Lullaby, which proved to be the most charming piece of this memorable evening.