Paul Hillier celebrates Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday at MNCARS | Culture

Paul Hillier met Arvo Pärt at London’s Victoria Station in January 1984, during a 25-minute journey to Gatwick Airport. The British choral director tells it in the preface to his pioneering monograph on the Estonian composer, published in 1997 within the prestigious series Oxford Studies of Composers. That meeting marked the beginning of a close collaboration, which was soon joined by record producer Manfred Eicher, from which fundamental recordings emerged for the ECM label, such as Trees (1987) y Passio (1988), prelude to Pärt’s great international media projection, comparable to that of the American minimalists.

For the director of The Hilliard Ensemble, the transition from medieval and Renaissance music to contemporary music was a natural leap; for the author of For Alina y The taste of the tastewas confirmation of having found the ideal sound for his austere compositional technique. The National Center for Musical Diffusion inaugurated, last Monday the 8th, its cycle Series 20/21 in Auditorium 400 of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNARS) with a celebration of Pärt’s 90th birthday—retired for years in his native Estonia—and also of the 40 years of collaboration with Hillier, director of Theater of Voices since 1990.

The performance at the MNARS brought together four voices from the vocal ensemble and the string soloists of the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra. This dialogue between vocal quartet and string quartet allowed us to enjoy three famous compositions by Pärt, linked to religious pieces from the 12th and 15th centuries that greatly influenced the composer during the creative crisis after Credo (1968), from which emerged his famous tintinnabuli. In his aforementioned book, Hillier offers the first explanation of this compositional technique, whose name was coined by Nora Pärt—musicologist and wife of the composer—in a program note from 1977, when comparing its homophony with the prolonged resonance of the bells.

Hillier describes Pärt’s system as a horizontal and vertical relationship of notes that reinvents the use of tonality. Its essential texture is built on two simultaneous or homophonic voices: the melodic voice (M voice), based on diatonic scales, and the tintinnabular (voice T), formed by the notes of the fundamental triad. For the composer, the M voice represents “the subjective world, the selfish and everyday life of sin and suffering,” while the T voice embodies “the objective realm of forgiveness.” Both are constantly balanced: “the M voice may seem wandering, but it is always firmly supported by the T voice.” This dual conception refers to the opposition between body and spirit, earth and sky, the philosophical and sound core of the tintinnabuli the pearns.

The concert opened with an essential example of this technique, in the kirie of his Miss Syllabica (1977). The M voice of mezzo-soprano Laura Lamph descends to the note D in each word of the invocation Kyrie eleisonwhile Katarzyna Bugala’s viola sustains the notes of the fundamental D minor triad in the T voice. The effect, repeated three times, is as simple as it is contained, but it acquires variety thanks to the impeccable declamation of the liturgical text and the multiplication of the M voices of the singers and the T voices of the string instruments. This is seen more clearly in the larger sections, such as the gloria and, above all, in the creed, where Hillier precisely highlighted the dissonant chord that opens the Crucifix in the two female voices. However, the climax came with the agnusdéi, where Hillier’s reading revealed a deep understanding of the pauses not written by Pärt.

The two short antiphons composed by the 12th-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen, together with the Mozarabic chant, served to highlight the quality of the solo members of Theater of Voices. The female voices stood out more than the male ones, thanks to the exquisite interpretation of The viridissima virga, birddistributed in verses between the austere mezzo-soprano Laura Lamph and the delicately ornamented voice of soprano Else Torp. For his part, tenor Christopher Bowen addressed God aeternewhile bass Jakob Bloch Jespersen intoned Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet.

Between both interventions, the quartet of the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra performed Brothers (1977), another of the paradigmatic examples of tintinnabuli of Pärt. The version for string quartet of this static and subtle piece was chosen, in which both the first violin and the viola modify their tuning using a detuning. Both instruments assume, respectively, the voices M and T, while the second violin acts as a pedal and the cello reinforces the voice M in the low register. The result suffered from a certain lack of naturalness in the impasto and a more organic vision of the dynamic arc that structures and projects the work.

Quite the opposite offered the motet Virgin Mother of Christ by Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez, performed by Theater of Voices under the direction of Paul Hillier. His imitative fluidity in pairs of voices—soprano and alto first, tenor and bass later—culminated in a perfectly resolved confluence.

Without a doubt, the highlight of the program came at the end with Unknown (1985), one of the most notable compositions within the tintinnabuli of Pärt. Hillier, one of its most notable performers, not only recorded it on his aforementioned album Treesbut also, more recently, with Theater of Voices for the Harmonia Mundi label. His direction revealed an admirable mastery of the chamber austerity typical of the original version for vocal and instrumental sextet: soprano, countertenor (or alto) and tenor, accompanied by violin, viola and cello.

Hillier maintained tension and suspension throughout this sober twenty-five-minute arc of sound. Pärt here explores various combinations of voices and instruments, constructing musical and structural patterns closely linked to the 13th century poem that evokes the Virgin’s pain before the crucified Christ. In the introduction, of a slightly imitative and melismatic character, the excessive vibrato of the strings contrasted with the purity of the voices. Balance was achieved gradually, and the three instrumental interludes provided moments of great intensity, especially in Make me stripes to be vulnerable (“Make his wounds lacerate me”), where the soprano Else Torp stood out for her powerful and luminous treble. The closing achieved a higher concentration than the beginning, with admirable control of both sound and silences, essential elements in this music.

To conclude, Hillier addressed an ideal tip as a culmination: Give Peace O (2004), where the maturity of the tintinnabuli by Pärt, oriented towards greater solidity, timbral integration and expressive depth. It is also a composition conceived in memory of the victims of 11-M, always present in the commemorations of that tragic day. Hillier once again demonstrated his mastery in the transparency of sound and the control of resonance, qualities that have so moved the Estonian composer himself.