The phrase “national treasure” gets overused, but in the case of Arvo Pärt, you can’t really argue. So on a first visit to Estonia, there was no doubt about coming to a concert at the Arvo Pärt Centre, set in a pine forest near the composer’s home on the Baltic coast some 40km from Tallinn. The Centre was opened three years ago and its 150 seat concert hall is an oak box-within-a-box thing of beauty, sounding as good as it looks. This was also a chance to see one of the young artists that we’ve interviewed: 23-year old violinist Hans Christian Aavik was performing music with pianist Karolina Žukova to launch their debut album, entitled Aeternus.
From the start, the programme certainly didn’t lack ambition: the Chaconne from Bach’s Violin Partita no. 2 in D minor is one of the behemoths of the solo violin repertoire, requiring virtuosity both at a technical level (all those double stops and fast passagework) and at an architectural level (the need to develop a coherent structure both for individual phrases and the overall arc of a piece lasting nearly a quarter of an hour). At the technical level, Aavik’s playing was not to be faulted: his timbre was good, as was his sense of building a phrase, and he was particularly impressive at the points where the music turns into a long series of clusters of four semiquavers which cross the strings, playing with dexterity and evenness, without slowing the pulse of the music even by a fraction.
A more experienced artist on a less crucial occasion might have felt able to take more risks: bolder attack on those double stops, greater variation in dynamics and colour as the music moves from one wave to the next. Aavik’s Chaconne is impressive, but it’s by no means the finished article: there’s more emotional intensity available to be extracted from this iconic work.
Just as much as the Bach, Schubert’s Violin Sonata in A minor, D.385 is music that washes over one in successive waves, each one subtly modifying the wave that has come before it. Žukova proved herself to be an adept chamber pianist with an excellent touch. Her legato was as smooth as you could ask for, she could lend shape to a phrase and her weightings of each note or chord were always well chosen. The interplay between the two musicians came across as confident and intuitive. The Minuet could have been heavier, the fourth movement could sparkle more: but this was another impressive performance from both musicians.
And so on to Pärt’s Fratres – music that is very different from the Bach or Schubert melodically or harmonically, but which shares that overall construction of waves of sound, each taking you to a different mental place. Fittingly, this was the most persuasive of the three works: the opening crescendo was exciting, the piano entry superbly done, the interplay of heavy piano chords and four note figures on the violin thrilling, the high harmonics on the violin wonderfully ethereal. As in the Bach, Aavik was able to generate excitement by the density of notes increasing while the pulse stays rock steady. Fratres is a repetitive piece – but played like this, it proves that repetition can thrill, each return of a phrase sounding as an old friend showing us a different side of their character.
David's trip to Estonia was funded by Visit Estonia.
