Join us for our first digital Dash Café on 28 October! This time our EUROPEANS series celebrates the life and work of one of the world’s most-loved composers Arvo Pärt, who turned 85 this year.
A mini-concert performed by a British pianist Sophia Rahman and Estonian violinist Andres Kaljuste at the Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia will be interwoven with a conversation with both musicians and Michael Pärt, son of the composer and Chairman of the Arvo Pärt Centre, hosted by Dash Arts Artistic Director Josephine Burton.
The conversation will explore the socio-political and musical environment in the Soviet Union in the seventies that led Pärt to an eight year long creative crisis in search for his own personal form of expression. In 1976, Pärt emerged with a new and highly original musical language – tintinnabuli – expressing the composer’s special relationship to silence and to a deeply sensed attitude to life, based on religious practice and a quest for truth, beauty and purity. The religious aspect of Pärt’s tintinnabuli music led to more and more confrontations with Soviet officials and forced Pärt’s family to emigrate in 1980.
You will hear music written during this turbulent time, as well as pieces created after his return to Estonia in 2010, where he lives with his family today.
We will host an audience Q&A with participants at the end of the event.
With much gratitude to The Estonian Embassy in London and the Arvo Pärdi Keskus / Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia.
Image credit: Kaupo Kikkas Photography
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