ARVO PÄRT, "24 PRELÜÜDI ÜHELE FUUGALE"

Directed by Dorian Supin, 2002.

Date: Sep 10th, 2005. Format: Television broadcast. Surrounding: Tampere.

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is celebrating (it might be this is not the best-fitting verb) his 70th birthday today. Yesterday there was a Pärt theme on Yle Teema, which is - by the way - the one and only somehow interesting tv channel today in Finland. Like so many other film buffs, me too was introduced to Pärt's minimalistic music in James Gray's (where is he by the way, now?) Little Odessa (1994), which I saw in the early 1996. But the real enthusiasm to his work started to grow on me in the spring of 1999, when I was living in my first rental apartment which was located in Ala-Pispala, Tampere. Every Sunday evening I usually listened to "space commander" Jukka Mikkola's Avaruusromua on Radiomafia channel. Then once he played the second part of Tabula Rasa. That same year I saw Pärt alive when his Orient & Occident had its first public performance in Tampere-talo in December and he was visiting there. This documentary gets of course a wide interest globally because Pärt's person is just as mysterious as his music. He is interviewed about the main thesis of his life and art, and his creative process is also been followed. We watched this with a friend of mine who is also quite keen on Pärt's music. After the document they send also two programmes linking with the subject, in the first one there was The Hilliard Ensemble performing - and explaining... ehhm.. - Pärt's music, and in the second one there was astounding - at times - Taiwanese dance group called Cloud Gate using Pärt and Chinese flute music. What touched me the most in this harmonic document was Pärt's memory of his childhood sundays (he was also born on sunday). He described perfectly the feeling I guess we all still have about that most different day of the week, and how enormously it every time changed the normal idea of daily life, which was taught to us. What comes to my mind from my childhood is that certain boring beauty when nothing really happens, and you can't change that fact even if you'd have the will and the energy. Everything should be peaceful and relaxing, but there are still some worries and questionmarks in the air, even if they are not talked aloud or even pointed out in any way. That complexed feeling is quite interesting, and no matter how much I give my support to the on-going cultural evolution that shops should be open on Sundays too, I am verry sorry for the generation which is born to this tradition, cause they will never understand the feeling of Sunday. Maybe they can find it from Pärt's music. *****