How Arvo Pärt became a master of simplicity – a tribute at the Tonhalle Zurich

Uncle Arvo ensures a packed house. Early Sunday evening, the Tonhalle Zurich isn't just packed, it's sold out. It's not the typical audience that usually attends such events—it spans all age groups and social classes, from curious first-timers to concert pros.

And something else immediately catches your ear: a noticeably large amount of Estonian is being spoken. No wonder, then, that Zurich's music director, Paavo Järvi, himself an Estonian by birth, is honoring the country's most famous artist, the composer Arvo Pärt, this evening. He is something of a national saint of Estonia. At the same time, he has been one of the world's most frequently performed living composers for decades.

Paavo Järvi might still call him "Uncle Arvo," he once revealed; he has known Pärt personally since childhood through his father Neeme, the head of the Järvi conducting family. This performance in Zurich is not about private anecdotes, of course, but rather an appreciation of the astonishingly multifaceted oeuvre of Pärt, who turned ninety in September. And Järvi's homage makes it clear: what Pärt is known and appreciated for around the world is only a part of his work.

In fact, even people who don't associate his name with anything familiar know the special Pärt sound. Pärt made contemporary music, which had long been committed to a predominantly constructivist way of thinking, more widely accessible. He did so by opening it up to the mystical and meditative, even the archaic and primal, qualities of the sounds. He thus offers a point of contact even for listeners who otherwise have little connection with contemporary music. This highly evocative, highly ritualized personal style can be experienced exemplarily in Järvi's homage, Pärt's major work, "Tabula Rasa."

In this double concerto, the young Estonian violinist Hans Christian Aavik and the renowned violinist Midori capture precisely that peculiar state of suspension in which the incessant repetition of formulas and sequences leads to a feeling of timelessness, yet simultaneously sharpens the perception of each individual note. The magical, sometimes esoteric or spiritual effect has made "Tabula Rasa" and many other works created since 1976 in the so-called tintinnabuli style cult pieces. They are occasionally even used in obstetrics and palliative care.

With the excellent Estonian Festival Orchestra, Järvi also presents the "other," almost unknown, early Pärt. A truly ambivalent experience, given that Pärt described many of his pieces before 1976 as "wrong paths." The fact that they can be heard here is nevertheless revealing, for with their highly experimental yet strangely impersonal character, the "Collage on B-A-C-H" and the brutally loud, decidedly avant-garde orchestral crescendo "Perpetuum mobile" from 1963/64 demonstrate just how thorny the path to the "real" Pärt sound truly was.

With their meticulously detailed interpretations, crafted down to the finest sonic ramifications, Järvi and his Festival Orchestra make something else clear: the later Pärt, as heard here in "La Sindone" from 2006, a moving meditation on the Shroud of Turin, appears musically incomparably richer, even though the complexity of his scores diminishes. Pärt finds the essential precisely in the simple and immediate. This already secures his place in music history.