New York Classical Review

Carnegie Hall hosted two concerts last October to celebrate the 90th birthday of Arvo Pärt, not just one of the great composers of the last fifty years but often the most performed living composer. Those concerts came after Pärt’s actual birthdate (September 11), and there’s no shame in extending the time to honor such a substantial artist. So it was easy to accept Thursday night’s performance by the Experiential Orchestra under conductor James Blachly as part of the party, or call it the afterparty.

Pärt’s music needs no special justification, of course, it needs a specific kind of committed performer, an appropriate acoustic space, and an attentive and patient audience. All of those elements came together in St. James’s Chapel inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in a performance that got at the heart of what Pärt does, and left a lingering effect.

Experiential played eight works for string orchestra. The first two were United States premieres: the string orchestra arrangement of Für Lennart in memoriam and the 2014 composition Sequentia (with percussionist Jeremy Levine). Pärt frequently rearranges and re-orchestrates the same works for different ensembles, so the program also included Vater unser for string orchestra and mezzo-soprano (Meg Bragle), and the string version of Da pacem Domine, most often heard from a choir.

The difference in quality with strings meant the evening centered on the more ascetic side of this music, true to Pärt’s methods and expression, and put together as a kind of instrumental mass. (The program asked listeners to hold their applause until the very end, and the audience did so.) The concert then unfolded at a smoothly floating pace, the ensemble playing with poise and care, the sequence of pieces holding time in place and creating the illusion of the surrounded dimensions expanding and deepening.

The composer’s son, Michael, appeared for an interview Thursday morning on WKCR, and spoke about an essential quality in Pärt’s music that is unique in the classical mainstream; it only works when musicians are able to set aside the normal ways of interpretation and expression in the classical repertoire and approach things with a “clean slate.” Playing Pärt means unlearning centuries of music and hearing and thinking about music in quasi-Medieval way, exposing oneself as a vessel for deceptively simple music.

The demand is for a concentrated exactitude and a different view of time, and the ensemble answered. Pärt’s tonality is precise, consonances need to be exact so that dissonances will have all their power, and the Experiential musicians’ intonation was near flawless through the entire concert. Some of the music, especially Orient Occident which came fourth, gives room for touches of vibrato and some portamento—in Pärt’s context, these normal expressive gestures become jarring with possible meanings—but the bulk used nothing more than pitch, dynamics, and subtle but marked variations in string tone. Experiential had it all—pianissimos were so quiet as to be haunting, timbres ranged from fat to grainy to hollow.

The music also uses space. Michael Pärt also explained how his father’s music needs reverberant spaces, the acoustics an antiphonal partner to the compositions, and the chapel was a fine space for this. High ceilinged but only a fraction of the Cathedral’s vastness, the resonance added a glow without softening the sinews of each line.

There was the feeling of breathing in and out in each phrase, and an overall sensation of physical stillness giving way to the infinite possibilities of internal contemplation, the music as a guide. The performance, even in the dramatic Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten and Bragle’s delicately articulated Vater Unser—her voice rounded and pleasingly throaty—hit the exact balance of clear, energetic advocacy without expressive dictation. 

This was a musical ceremony, the Experiential Orchestra presenting Pärt’s ideas about time, space, and inner life, and musicians and audience sharing a regard for his special qualities. In the concluding Da pacem Domine, a feeling of social warmth and beauty seemed to rise out of the orchestra, and when it was done everyone shared in a long, welcome silence.

This program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. experientialorchestra.com