Arvo Pärt.
In Friday’s (8/9) Gramophone (U.K.), Andrew Mellor writes, “As composer Arvo Pärt marks his 90th birthday on September 11, we can recognize [his] aesthetic as one of the most resonant and wide-reaching in all contemporary art. People who claim no interest in notated music cleave nonetheless to the still, spiritual sounds made by the Estonian composer, as his compatriots do to the music of their most famous son. ‘He is the one Estonian who is recognized the world over,’ says Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the country’s president from 2006 to 2016 … ‘Contemporary classical music has a far broader audience than it would have reached without him.’ Every year is a big year for Pärt. Plenty of polls rate him either the most performed composer alive, or a close second to John Williams. Unsurprisingly, 2025 is proving even bigger…. There will be at least 48 Pärt-themed concerts in Australia alone, and plenty more in the Philippines, Korea, China and Japan, with a notable surge in the composer’s heartlands of Europe and America … ‘There is a worldwide Arvo Pärt cult,’ jokes the Finnish conductor Eva Ollikainen, fresh from recording the composer’s four symphonies with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. ‘People just really want to hear this music.’ ”
