Portland-based vocal ensemble Cappella Romana creates otherworldly mystic sounds with layers of harmony, plumbing that space where eastern and western sacred music meet. While most of their repertory involves the old world, occasionally they love to inject a little new music. One composer in particular embodies their approach to choral music — Arvo Pärt.
Cappella Romana has organized a festival of Pärt’s music, the first in the U.S., Feb. 5–12. Joining with Third Angle New Music Ensemble and other musicians, they will offer eight live chamber performances, documentary film screenings and lectures interpreting the groundbreaking composer.
Pärt is the world’s most-performed composer alive today. Growing up in Soviet-era Estonia, Pärt was considered a rebel in the world of composition. His early compositions broke both compositional and political rules in a very tense historical moment. Some were even rejected for incorporating western techniques.
“He spoke with musically — such a directness and a simplicity and a sense of timelessness and calm,” says Alexander Lingas, the musical director and founder of Cappella Romana. “I’d just come off an undergraduate degree in composition … and here was someone speaking in the most straightforward language rooted in ancient things but yet thoroughly contemporary.”
Here are a few highlights from our talk with Lingas. He will give a free talk, “Ancient Hymns & Modern Composers,” at Reed College at 2 p.m. before the festival finale concert of Pärt’s “Te Deum.”
April Baer: Tell us a little bit about the genesis for this.
Alexander Lingas: Well, Cappella Romana has had a long association with Pärt’s music, and we’ve been asked both as a group and me as an individual wearing my scholarly hat to engage with his music at various times. This was a chance for us then to do an overview of his music, to look back ourselves, now that we are in our 25th anniversary year, at both the range of Pärt’s music and also in some ways a kind of history of our own engagement with his music.
AB: The repertoire that Cappella Romana is best known for is very ancient. How do you see Pärt fitting in?
AL: I think Pärt is a perfect example of what got us going in the first place. He bridges the ancient and the modern, east and the west, in his music.
AB: Cappella Romana is performing quite a bit of Part’s “Canon of Repentance,” which is in the original Church Slavonic. Why did you choose this piece?
AL: The “Kanon Pokajanen,” precisely because it is in the Church Slavonic, is something that is very close to Cappella’s repertoire because we are used to performing in the original languages of eastern Christian worship — Greek, Slavonic. And with that concert containing the Pokajanen, we are forming that into a miniature orthodox prayer service.
AB: What we know of Part’s intentions—I don’t think that he necessarily intended his music as a balm.
AL: I’m not sure about that. I think in some ways, he did, but not in a superficial way, not in the way of a cheap comfort. It’s very much a balm for the soul. I think that precisely the notion of repentance that is in so much of his music, that’s explicit in the “Kanon Pokajanen,” the “Canon of Repentance.” But I think it’s also confronting yourself with deep and ultimate truths, which has aspects of pain to it, but also ones of acceptance and repose.
Courtesy Cappella Romana
/Arco Pärt is the most performed living composer in the world.
Courtesy Cappella Romana
/Cappella Romana founder Alexander Lingas
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