Arvo Pärt: The Symphonies review – the Parts that make the whole

Arvo Pärt is now in his early 80s, and firmly established as one of the few living composers whose works offer a bridge between contemporary music and non-specialist concert audiences. That stature is founded on the music he’s written since the mid-1970s, whether instrumental scores such as Tabula Rasa and Fratres, or choral works including Passio, Berliner Messe and the Stabat Mater. They all develop his technique of “tintinnabulation”, which allowed Pärt to bring familiar melodic shapes and tonal harmonies into a totally new musical world. But before that stylistic sea change, Pärt had been a very different kind of composer, producing the first 12-note music ever composed in his native Estonia (in 1960) – which attracted the disapproval of the Soviet authorities as much as it won the approval of the western European avant-garde – and experimenting with a variety of other modernist styles, from neoclassicism to collage and aleatoricism.

This disc, definitively conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste, who seems to have become the composer’s preferred interpreter, is the first to include all four of Pärt’s symphonies, and hence traces the early part of that stylistic journey. While the Fourth Symphony, subtitled Los Angeles, was not composed until 2008, and so belongs to the reassuring tonal world that Pärt made his own, its three predecessors go back to the start of his composing career. There’s dissonance and angular 12-note polyphony in the First, from 1964, and almost Webern-like compression in the 10-minute Second (1966), while the Third, from 1971, shows the first signs of the new direction Pärt would subsequently follow, with references to Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony, and a much clearer emphasis on melodic writing. To those who only know the later works, these early scores will seem to inhabit a different musical world altogether. Kaljuste and his orchestra are just as convincing when placidly unwrapping those bundles of archaic-sounding melody, as he is confronting the angularities and contrapuntal clashes of the earlier works.

This week’s other picks

Andris Nelsons’ latest recordings for Deutsche Grammophon add the Fourth and Seventh Symphonies to his Bruckner series with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, which began last year with the Third Symphony.

As before, the playing is sumptuous, though the performances aren’t always totally convincing. Nelsons’ account of the Fourth lacks coherence – tempi are on the slow side – the Seventh (recorded live just last month) is much more impressive, its pacing more assured, its sense of wholeness unmistakable. There’s room for Wagner fill-ups on both discs too – the Fourth gets a rapt account of the first-act prelude from Lohengrin, the Seventh a fierce, slow-burn account of Siegfried’s Funeral March from Götterdämmerung.