It’s Arvo Part’s 90th birthday year, which is good news if you like your minimalism glum, low and very, very slow. Lots of people seem to. The London Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday night was a reminder of an earlier, less ingratiating Part: the dissident composer in Soviet-controlled Estonia. Hannu Lintu revived Part’s First Symphony of 1963, and there’s nothing remotely minimal about its opening. There’s a swagger of brass, machine rhythms and an onslaught of string chords in which the dissonances don’t feel aggressive so much as mischievous. This is a young composer taking a manic glee in piling on the wrong notes just because he can.
A bold, obstreperous piece, in other words and it’s the colours that make it: jagged brass taunts and occasional pools of pared-back stillness – a whispered clarinet trill, a violin solo – that hint at the future Part familiar from Radio Three’s exciting new insomnia playlist. On the strength of this performance, which was excellent, I wasn’t convinced that the Symphony was quite as bolshy as it makes out – that if you removed the tone-rows and the lip-smacking discords you’d be left with much more than Hindemith-style paste-and-cardboard neoclassicism. (The programme note described serialism as a ‘hardcore modernist movement’, which was sweet, and reminiscent of Betjeman’s description of High and Over – ‘a style called Moderne, perhaps rather old-fashioned today’.)
Still, it’s bracing to recall how different the world looked from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain; and how, for composers like Part and Lutoslawski – whose Third Symphony made up the second half of the concert – theories that were already hardening into dogma in the West proved a genuinely liberating force.
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