Rockport Music - Bach & Arvo Pärt - TABULA RASA: DOUBLE CONCERTO FOR TWO VIOLINS, STRINGS AND PREPARED PIANO

TABULA RASA: DOUBLE CONCERTO FOR TWO VIOLINS, STRINGS AND PREPARED PIANO

Arvo Pärt

TABULA RASA: DOUBLE CONCERTO FOR TWO VIOLINS,
STRINGS AND PREPARED PIANO

Arvo Pärt (b. Paide, Estonia, September 11, 1935)

Composed 1977; 27 minutes

Tabula Rasa was composed in 1977 to a suggestion from violinist Gidon Kremer for a concert that included Alfred Schnittke’s First Concerto Grosso, with similar instrumental resources to Pärt’s two solo violins, strings and prepared piano. Screws and felts placed between the piano strings generate a bell-like sonority, which can be amplified. Like the rest of Pärt’s mature music, the two contrasting movements of Tabula Rasa [Ludus (Game) and Silentium (Silence)] consciously explore direct, uncontrived communication built upon musical repetition. This is far removed from the
goal-oriented music of an artist such as Beethoven. Pärt’s music is concerned with being, existing and evolving, rather than becoming.

The phrase tabula rasa has a long history, translating literally as a ‘blank slate.’ “Gregorian chant has taught me that a cosmic secret is hidden in the art of combining two or three notes,” Pärt said in 1988. He calls it his tintinnabula technique (from the Latin tintinnabulum = ‘bell’). A strict discipline and logic controls the movement of lines within the music. The first movement, Ludus (marked ‘with movement’) evolves over eight variations towards an intricately woven intense climax and cadenza. It is punctuated by silences and grounded throughout by a deep, tolling bell from the piano. In Silentium, (marked ‘without movement’), the bass voice moves at the quickest speed, while the lines above move progressively slower up to the slowest moving, the solo violins. The music meditates over gentle triadic oscillations, ascending and descending bass lines, and a recurring piano figure, every note speaking within an ever-shifting texture until this dies away into the depths. Speaking of the September 30, 1977 première in Tallinn, Estonia, Nora Pärt,
the composer’s wife, recalls: “Never again have I experienced the hushed silence that took over the assembly hall after the première.”