Feb 16 2008

Fantastic start to the Living Music festival

Published by Karlin at 12:48 am under events

Tonight (Friday) was the launch of the Living Music Festival, which is on all this weekend and features the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. All three pieces at the National Concert hall were wonderful but what a slam dunk job they did on the final piece, Pärt's Credo from 1968. The RTE choir was there,with over 120 members, and boy, the volume was incredible in the raucous bits! It was both terrifying yet funny -- the deliberate cacophony in parts of the piece -- and movingly beautiful, very emotional at the end. The audience loved it, and even more so when Pärt came up to the stage from the audience and got a long standing ovation and cheers. He was clearly overwhelmed by the response and had to keep coming back out to keep the crowd happy. It's open seating for these events so I arrived a bit early and got a nice centre sat in the balcony -- I like being up high to watch the orchestra and that definitely was the right choice for this concert given the wonderful range of percussion instruments -- tubular bells to (what looked to me like) xylophones and glockenpsiels (but apparently was a vibraphone and who knows what else). From the main floor the percussionists' activities wouldn't have been very visible. I can't wait for Sunday when I have tickets for the Crash Ensemble doing number of wonderful Pärt works at Trinity in the late afternoon, including Spiegel im Spiegel and then tickets for the NCH again that evening for more Pärt. BTW if you are going to the NCH be sure to check out the Pärt exhibit from the Estonian Embassy. The rather bizarre translation is one of the delights of reading it!

One response so far

One Response to “Fantastic start to the Living Music festival”

  1. David says:

    Thanks for flagging this festival a few weeks back. I first came across Arvo Pärt on Tim Bray’s weblog a couple of years ago and made a mental note to check his music out at some point.

    When I saw the same name on your blog, with another strong endorsement, I was convinced to buy a ticket and hear the music properly.

    So I was there last night at the NCH. The music was just beautiful, and hypnotic. I now count myself a fan.

    I wasn’t expecting the composer himself to be there so that was a wonderful bonus.

    So thanks for the tip!

Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes