Arvo Part's "Brothers" in Salzburg

Synopsis

In 1980, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt emigrated from his Soviet-controlled homeland and settled in Austria. Since the 1960s, Pärt’s increasingly spiritual and overtly religious music, imbued with mystical and contemplative rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, did not sit well with the communist authorities, and Pärt found it increasing hard to live and work in Estonia.

On today’s date in 1980, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, another Baltic artist, the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, gave the premiere performance of a new violin-piano arrangement of Part’s Fratres, or Brothers — an instrumental work from 1977 that Pärt subsequently rescored for a variety of ensembles.

In the version commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, the original harmonic material resides in the serene piano part, while the violin plays virtuosic variations above it. That serenity is the result of Pärt’s effort to — as he put it — “learn to walk again as a composer.” He came up with a term, tintinnabulation, for the simplicity and directness of expression he sought.

“Tintinnabulation is like this,” writes Pärt. “I am alone with silence. I work with very few elements … The three notes of the triad are like bells. And that is why I called it tintinnabulation.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935): Fratres; Gidon Kremer, violin; Keith Jarrett, piano; ECM 1275

On This Day

Births

• 1903 - American composer and pianist Abram Chasins, in New York City

• 1928 - American composer T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) Anderson, in Coatesville, Pennsylvania

• 1943 - English composer Edward Cowie, in Birmingham

Deaths

• 1786 - Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, flute player and amateur composer, 74, in Potsdam

• 1958 - French composer Florent Schmitt, 87, in Neuilly-sur-Seine

• 1961 - French-born American composer and harpist Carlos Salzedo, 76, in Waterville, Maine

• 1973 - French composer Jean Barraque, 45, in Paris

• 1981 - American composer Robert Russell Bennett, 87, in New York City

• 1983 - American lyricist Ira Gershwin, 86, in Beverly Hills, California

Premieres

• 1876 - First complete performance of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle concludes at Bayreuth with a performance of Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods)

• 1937 - John Ireland: A London Overture at a Proms Concert conducted by Sir Henry Wood

• 1946 - Honegger: Symphonie Liturgique (No. 3) in Zürich, conducted by Charles Munch, to whom the work is dedicated;

• 1953 - von Einem: opera Der Prozess (The Trial), at the Salzburg Festival in Austria; This opera is based on the novel by Franz Kafka

• 1955 - Werner Egk: opera Irische Legende (Irish Legend), at the Salzburg Festival in Austria

• 1974 - Penderecki: Magnificat, for bass solo, chorus, and orchestra, in Salzburg, Austria

Others

• 1928 - Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg wins $10,000 Schubert Centenary Prize offered by Columbia Phonograph Company of New York for his Symphony in C

• 1957 - During lecture at the Tanglewood Festival, American composer Gunther Schuller coins the phrase “third stream” to describe a type of composition in which elements of jazz are organized within a classical musical structure