Strings of Fire



Arvo Pärt
b. 1935

Arvo Pärt
Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten

Arvo Pärt possesses one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary classical music, the product of eclectic influences from the “official” Soviet aesthetic to Renaissance polyphony. Born near Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, Pärt e began his formal musical education in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Secondary School, suspending it a year later to fulfill his National Service obligation as an oboist and side-drummer in an army band. He entered the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957 while working as a recording engineer with Estonian Radio. Although still a student, he composed music for the stage and film. By the time he graduated in 1963, he was already considered a professional composer.

Immediately preceding World War II, Estonia had been bloodlessly annexed by the Soviet Union, leaving the young Pärt with only limited access to the musical developments in the West. His early compositions, including his first two symphonies, employed serial techniques, but he soon tired of the rigid rules of twelve-tone composition. After studying French and Flemish choral music from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, including the great composers of this period, Guillaume de Machaut, Johannes Ockeghem, Jakob Obrecht and Josquin Despres, Pärt began incorporating the style and spirit of early European polyphony into his own compositions, beginning in 1971with his Symphony No. 3.

After a lengthy period of silence during which he attempted to develop his personal voice, Pärt emerged in 1976 with a technique he called “tintinnabuli” (little bells), to which he has mostly adhered to this day. He describes the technique as follows: “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements – with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation." The guiding principle behind the technique involves composing two simultaneous voices as one line – one voice moving stepwise to and from a central pitch, first up then down, and the other sounding the notes of the triad (chord) founded on that pitch. The first products of Pärt’s new voice were the popular
Fratres, Tabula Rasa, and the moving Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten.

The forced isolation behind the Iron Curtain and the endless struggle against Soviet bureaucracy forced Pärt to leave Estonia in 1980, settling in West Berlin. Since then, the majority of his compositions have been settings of religious texts. Around 2000 he returned to Estonia, and is now living in Tallinn. Pärt’s compositions, including the Cantus, have been used as background music in more than 50 films and TV programs.

Pärt composed the Cantus in 1977 in memory of Britten who had died in December 1976. He had just learned to appreciate Britten’s music, and had wanted very much to meet him.

A single tubular bell in A – the funeral bell – struck at fixed intervals throughout, serves as the fulcrum around which the string melody gradually evolves. The musical texture is slow, seamless, without a defined meter and difficult to excerpt; Pärt consistently maintains the effect of the opening, gradually bringing it to climax through dynamics alone



Ottorino Respighi
1879-1936

Ottorino Respighi
Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No. 3

Ottorino Respighi was one of the most imaginative orchestrators of the first part of the twentieth century. While most of his musical studies were undertaken in Italy, he spent two crucial years in Russia where he took lessons in orchestration with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. He developed a masterful technique in the use of instrumental color and sonority, firmly rooted in the late-Romantic tradition. He maintained this style with only marginal influence from the revolutionary changes in music that occurred during his lifetime.

Respighi was also a scholar of early music, editing the works of Claudio Monteverdi and Tomaso Antonio Vitali, as well as transcribing works by many Renaissance and early Baroque composers – although in an idiosyncratic manner anathema to modern musicological practices. He also delighted in arranging obscure early music for modern performance. His three suites of Ancient Airs and Dances are based on Italian and French lute music mostly from the early seventeenth century to accompany dancers and singers,

Respighi composed Suite No. 3 in 1931 for string orchestra. His orchestration brings a modern cast to the old melodies, but unlike many modern arrangers of older music, he does not tamper with the original harmonies. His predilection for broad internal tempo changes is definitely not authentic for the original versions. On the other hand, Renaissance and early Baroque lutenists would have been freer with ornamentation, especially during repeats.

The Suite comprises four distinct movements; the first, marked Andantino, is based on an anonymous Italian popular melody of the early seventeenth century.

The second movement is something of a suite within a suite. Respighi grouped six numbers from a single source and composer, the Arie di Corte (Airs of the Court) by the Burgundian (Northeastern French) lutenist and composer Jean-Baptiste Besard (1567 – after 1616). To round off the set, Respighi repeats the first air, “It is a misfortune that I love you,” at the end of the movement.

The third movement, in ABA form, is an anonymous pastoral Siciliana from early in the seventeenth century, with a more vigorous middle (B) section.

The final movement is based on a passacaglia (Chaconne) (a form based on a short repeating bass line or harmonic progressions) from the 1692 collection Capricci armonici sopra la chitarra spagnola by the seventeenth century Italian guitarist and composer Ludovico Roncalli. While the previous movements are relatively even-tempered, Respighi endows the passacaglia and its variations over a continuous repeating ground with considerable emotional intensity and variety.

He also refines the form so that each variation is repeated.



Rodion Shchedrin
b. 1932

Rodion Shchedrin
Carmen Suite, Op. 37

One of the most prolific of Russian composers of the second half of the twentieth century, Rodion Shchedrin was born in Moscow, the son of a composer and a professional violinist who taught at the Moscow Conservatory. He graduated from the Conservatory where he subsequently taught composition. Since 1969 Shchedrin has worked as a freelance composer. From 1973 to 1990 he succeeded Dmitry Shostakovich as chairman of the Composers’ Union of the Russian Federation and in 1990 was made honorary chairman of the organization. Since 1992 he has divided his time between Moscow and Munich, composing and teaching.

Shchedrin’s style is eclectic; he has a knack for combining the most avant-garde styles and methods with traditional folk and Russian church music. He has composed in all musical genres, including three operas and five ballets, twelve concertos, two symphonies and many other orchestral, chamber and vocal works. His larger compositions are marked by non-traditional structures; the Third Piano Concerto is a set of variations on a theme that is heard only at the end. Much of his music, especially since the mid-1980s, is neo-Romantic and always laced with musical irony and humor.

In addition to his many original works, Shchedrin has enjoyed “recomposing” other composers’ music. In fact, the ballet Carmen, a recomposing of George Bizet’s opera, first brought him to the attention of the West. Shchedrin composed the ballet in 1967 for his wife, Mayya Plisetskaya, then prima ballerina of the Bolshoy. He extracted from the ballet a suite of 13 movements, scored for a large body of strings and an army of percussion instruments requiring five percussionists. With sly humor Shchedrin took Bizet’s familiar melodies and served them up in ways Bizet would never have dreamed of. In love with Bizet’s music, Shchedrin could not resist adding to the stew the farandole from the incidental music to the play L'Arlésienne and the Danse bohèmienne from the opera La Jolie Fille de Perth. The Suite nearly foundered on the shoals of Soviet bureaucracy, who considered it “insulting to Bizet’s masterpiece.” Only intervention by Shostakovich rescued it and had it reinstated on the officially approved list.

Shchedrin’s approach to Carmen deliberately flies in the face of the expected. “Bizet's score is one of the most perfect in the whole history of music, and so I felt that it was very important, while working on the piece, to bring out the differences between my transcription and the original by means of tone colors,” he wrote. To begin with, the ballet is pure dance without any discernable plot line, and the order of the movements bears little relationship to the order of the music in the opera.

Instead of the opera’s well-known tremolo of the fate motive, the Suite begins with the fragmented refrain from Carmen’s habanera scored for chimes.

The first of two intermezzos features a marimba solo based the soldier’s Act 1 greeting at Carmen’s entrance.

Shchedrin’s “Changing of the Guard” – incidentally based on the Act 3 smugglers’ music – morphs into a syncopated tango.

These startling divergences from such a familiar classic, suggesting both irony and humor, are a component of much of Shchedrin’s other music.