Arvo Pärt has written much austerely beautiful music, but few works are as direct and affecting as his 1977 Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. The Estonian composer, who celebrates his 90th birthday this year, had only just discovered the purity of Britten’s music when the latter died. Pärt’s six-minute tribute pits undulating string scales against the sombre toll of a single bell.
It was a fitting opening to a wide-ranging concert in which the venerable Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was put through its paces by Pärt’s Baltic state compatriot, Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons. Emerging from the most poignant of pianissimos, crisscrossing lines rose and fell before the conductor’s clenched hands wrang the final drop of pathos out of the final chord.
