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04/27/2026
“Complete Symphonies”
Arvo Pärt: Symphony n° 1 “Polyphonic”, opus 9 – Symphony n° 2 – Symphony n° 3 – Symphony n° 4 “Los Angeles”
Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Sigrún Edvaldsdóttir (concertmaster), Eva Ollikainen (conductor)
Recording: Eldborg, Harpa, Reykjavik, Iceland (June 10‑13, 2025) – 76’48
Chandos SACD CHSA 5372 (Distributed by Naxos of America) – Booklet in English
Composer Arvo Pärt turns 90 this year and his music continues to entrance audiences in concert halls, on dance stages, via his movie scores. Pärt’s Estonian musical DNA is his North Star of a galaxy of sound worlds, from medieval chants to Slavonic liturgy, and tintinnabula, his indelible compositional template.
YouTube listeners list their reactions using words like “profound” or “transcendent”, “otherworldly”, “earthy”, “hypnotic” in describing many of his most admired works including Tabula rasa, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Spiegel im Spiegel, Für Alina and Fratres for Cello and Piano.
Iceland Symphony Orchestra led by conductor Eva Ollikainen recorded Pärt’s complete symphonies over three days in June 2025. Ms. Ollikainen’s detailing and the sharpness (and fluidity) of this orchestra articulates the composer’s mastery of neoclassical structure and his interplay with thresholds of this era’s symphonic canon. Pärt’s symphonies are fascinating in relation his later work and, in many ways, foreshadow his signatures of his later work.
It opens with his Symphony n° 1 “Polyphonic”, conjuring a gripping soundscape that is as airy as it is steely in its surging symphonic reverie. Its first movement, “Kanon”, has Stravinsky‑esque theatricality, but is soon its own beast, a mock heroic orchestral cloak with a more lyrical counterpoint that progresses (Con gran tensione) to its tornadic rhythmic drive.
From contrapuntal tangos, a nod to 12-note serialism that evaporates, as Paul Griffith cites in the liner notes, “its harmonic color, of course, this symphony is in a different world, but not so in its quasi-geometrical structures and its corresponding expressive ambiguity.” In the final Con forza, a slow timpani marches under the jabbing woodwinds that gives way to a pastoral fade out to an orchestral cliffhanger.
In 1966, the Symphony n° 2 is even more dramatic and subversive in its lurching orchestral dissonance with its slow‑moving crescendos that fade to shadowy soundscapes. In the final movement, Pärt alludes to Tchaikovsky’s “Sweet Dreams”. Perhaps ironically enough, Griffith reminds us that Pärt described this as “a ray of sunshine that brings in another world, other values, the pure soul of a child.”
The opening movement of Symphony n° 3 has the cinematic narrative thrust that you could imagine as a score to a 1950s biblical epic. Composed in 1971, it is, perhaps, Pärt’s most torrid exploration of symphonic form. A rowdy orchestral realm collapses to a journeying second movement soliloquy led by heralds that dissolves to ominous harmonies, an entr’acte of medieval chant voicings of the strings... a neomodern crashing into neomodern symphonics.
The third movement has a soulful and triumphal dramatic progression that lurches to a bombastic exit. It is followed on these recordings by the meditative field in three unpaused movements with a roaming adagio harp which hovers over everything. This progressive movement reveals a dramatic timpani bounding through a hail of upper strings that gives way to symphonic repose. Pärt based its musicality on chants and medieval harmonies, but they weren’t far from his repertoire because he was writing film scores for needed funds.
It would be three decades before Pärt composed his Symphony n° 4 “Los Angeles” (2007-2008) with its serene string and harp sound clouds that float the entrances of the piece. Pärt reveals this work contains “the character and the specific detail of the Church Slavonic poetry that strongly influenced the musical design.” The roiling symphonic entrance is a symbolic summoning of musical angels to represent the city that they inhabit. The colors cast somber chimes and percussive torrents which recede to meditative strings then give way to surging orchestral tides and thundering pianism and clamoring pizzicato. This is followed by harp and solo violin which quietly enter and dissolve into subterranean whispers, so that one might hear the mysteries of Pärt’s musical universe.
The acoustical dimensions on this Chandos recording is credited to the use of 24 bit/96 KHZ technology to achieve the full sound of these performances.
Lewis J. Whittington
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