Estonian's throw to aural bliss

The University of Auckland Chamber Choir. Photo / Sav Shulman.

While Schumann and Chopin's bicentenaries have been making their impact in concert halls and CD catalogues, the 75th birthday year of Estonian composer Arvo Part could almost pass one by. But not if choral maestra Karen Grylls and her colleagues and students from Auckland University's School of Music can do anything about it.

Tonight's PRISM concert, which has the young musicians crossing town from Symonds St to St Matthew-in-the-City, promises to be the highlight of what has amounted to a Part mini-festival.

"It's the way that Part expects the audience to meet what he writes on its own terms," is Grylls' assessment, when I ask her about the appeal of his work.

"I find it an incredibly spiritual music which gives the chance to ponder things presented simply."

Tonight's programme offers three samplings of Part's iconic choral music.

Alongside the 1989 Magnificat which, in Grylls' words, "gives the audience a chance to consider what Magnificat means for them rather than just ending in a blaze of glory", 1997's The Woman with the Alabaster Box evokes "the sadness of his life being dispossessed of his country".

The centrepiece of the concert is the Berliner Messe, a score that ranges from a Gloria that "is a real romp, with everything running along in a spirit of rejoicing" to an Agnus Dei which is "so still that it seems to float off to heaven".

And don't forget the silences, Grylls adds.

"Part's silences, the spaces in his music, relate to the acoustics in the places that he's ... heard his music performed in, and St Matthews will help to catch the quality of those silences."

Balancing the choral items, James Tibbles plays Part's 1976 Trivium for organ, and accompanies countertenor Dean Sky-Lucas in Part's 2000 setting of Robert Burns' My Heart's in the Highlands.

Sky-Lucas sees Part as "a seminal figure of the post-war years" and admires the Estonian composer for recharging his batteries mid-career by studying medieval and renaissance music. The Burns setting "has a mesmeric organ part and is one of Part's most important works," he says.

"The voice part is minimal, set amongst beautiful eight-foot organ stops. And the whole idea of a countertenor introduces such a medieval voice."

Sky-Lucas is also soloist in Eve de Castro-Robinson's new setting of Tennyson's Ring out, wild bells, accompanied by choir and bells.

For the Australian singer, this deals out "sounds which you'd never hear in another country, because the light is so different. When the choir comes in at one point, the brilliance of the sound is like cutting through glass".

Eve de Castro-Robinson herself remarks drily how her last choral piece (the prize-winning Chaos of Delight #3) presented "voices as birds. This one has voices as bells".

She finds writing choral music "difficult because it's hard not to produce a generic type of choral sound with a text. This piece is based on vocal bell sounds in a tintinnabulating texture and I thought it would be nice, and in keeping with Part's preoccupation with plainchant, to have an intoned line of text floating above the voices."

While de Castro-Robinson does not feel the personal influence of the composer, "his music is important in terms of being an antidote to what was going on in the late 70s with the dense and difficult writing of Boulez and Stockhausen.

"Here was a music that was listener-friendly and suggested some sort of spiritual uplifting. Part isn't a composer's composer," she concludes "but he's a wonderful force to have in our midst."

PERFORMANCE

What: PRISM

Where and when: St Matthew-in-the-City, Saturday August 7 at 7.30pm