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Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa in the US and Russia

Feb. 04, 2013

Arvo P&auml;rt&rsquo;s <em>Tabula Rasa</em> in the US and Russia

The new year sees conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn leading performances of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa with both the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Scored for two violins, prepared piano and string orchestra, Tabula Rasa was composed in 1977 for violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko. The Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra performed the work on January 25 with soloists Maria Safarova and Stanislav Izmailov at the Mariinsky Theatre Concert Hall in St. Petersburg.  From February 28 through March 2, Solzhenitsyn joins the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for three performances of TabulaRasa with soloists Madeline Adkins and Qing Li. The first performance takes place at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda and remaining performances are heard at the Weinberg Center for the Arts in Frederick, Maryland and at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore.

Tabula Rasa, one of Pärt’s most widely known works, demonstrates a stark departure from his earlier dodecaphonic style. Pärt explains:

I was convinced at that time that I simply could not go on with the means available; there were not enough materials, and so I simply stopped writing music. I would have liked to come into contact with something living, simple and not destructive. I just wanted a simple musical line, internally alive and breathing, the way it had existed in the song of distant epochs, and still does in today’s folk music; an absolute monody, a naked voice from which everything ensues.

For more information on Arvo Pärt, please visit www.universaledition.com.

To learn more about the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra performance, please visit www.mariinsky.ru.

For details on the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performances, visit www.bsomusic.org.

Arvo Pärt
Tabula Rasa (1977)
double concerto for two violins, prepared piano and string orchestra
27’

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