Arvo Pärt’s “Summa”: Renaud Capuçon and Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne
In 1994, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) said, I have developed a highly formalised compositional system, which I have been using to write my music for twenty years. Summa is the most strict and enigmatic work in this series. Beginning in the 1970s, Pärt’s music represented a radical departure from the atonal modernism that was prolific during much of the twentieth century. Instead, what emerged was music which was simultaneously …