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Music of Arvo Pärt Featured at Lincoln Center’s First Ever White Light Festival

Nov. 01, 2010

This month Lincoln Center presents the inaugural installment of the White Light Festival, a brand new fall festival focused on the transcendent and enlightening powers of music. The 2010 White Light Festival explores the spiritual dimension of music and the music of Arvo Pärt plays an integral role in the festival’s programming. Jane Moss, Lincoln Center’s Vice President for Programming elaborates:

In this inaugural season, we explore the spiritual dimension of music as manifested in different cultural and musical traditions, from masterpieces of the Western classical canon to Muslim and Hindu musical linkages in northern India and the mystical minimalism of the Baltic region.

… extend your White Light experience through a variety of free events, including discussions with the participating artists, in-depth explorations of festival themes, and informal post-performance parties. We hope these musical encounters will enable you, if only for the course of an evening, to experience moments of connection and wholeness in an increasingly frenetic and fragmented world.

Several works by Arvo Pärt are featured in four performances throughout the festival: on Sunday November 7, the Tallis Scholars perform his Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen, Nunc dimittis and Magnificat at Alice Tully Hall; on Thursday, November 11, pianist Alexei Lubimov includes Pärt’s early work for solo piano Für Alina in his solo piano recital at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse; and the Latvian National Choir perform his music on each of their two performances including the US premiere of Stabat mater on Saturday, November 13 Alice Tully Hall.

Pärt’s musical aesthetic proves an ideal vehicle for the festival’s mission with its tonal, slow-moving harmonies and the calming, meditative qualities of the composer’s signature tintinnabuli style known for possessing transformative capacities.

In December, ECM releases the reissue of Arvo Pärt:Tabula Rasa in a new Special Edition replete with scores to all four works on the album, previously unreleased facsimiles of Pärt’s manuscripts for Tabula Rasa and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, and exclusive photographs from the ECM archive. Originally released in 1984, Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa was the first album released on ECM’s New Series imprint and the title work, composed in 1977, was the first of the composer’s works to be heard publicly which utilized the tintinnabuli style. Beginning December 8, you can purchase the new special edition here.

Read Arthur Lubow’s recent feature on Arvo Pärt in the New York Times Magazinehere.

Learn more on Arvo Pärt and his music at universaledition.com.

More detailed information and precise ticketing information on the White Light Festival can be found at lincolncenter.org.

View WQXR's schedule of exclusive web broadcasts of select White Light performances, interviews, reviews and more here.

Arvo Pärt
Stabat Mater (1985/2008)
for SAT choir and string orchestra
also available for soprano, countertenor (alto), tenor, violin, viola and violoncello
24’

Tabula Rasa (1977)
double concerto for violin, viola, string orchestra and prepared piano
also available for two violins, string orchestra and prepared piano
27’

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