In the 1980s when I was having lessons with John Tavener, he played me part of a piece by Arvo Part. "People say he's like me. Or the other way round", the sage of Wembley Park said in his scratchy patrician voice, "I don't hear it myself though". I remember some chugging strings, fairly static; then an abrupt gear change. Then John turned the music off and we went on to other things.
A year or so later Part's Second Symphony appeared on the Proms programme. I went along. It sounded to me like an Estonian Vaughan Williams. I was somewhat against Vaughan Williams at the time and thought the piece dull; duller anyway than the brief snatch Tavener had played me.
While I was still at College I went to the British premiere of Part's St John Passion, sung by the Hilliard Ensemble. As I remember this piece meandered on for an hour or so in A minor, ending rather strikingly in a blaze of A major. I wasn't totally sure it was worth the wait.
Then that was that for a while. I remember people talking highly of a piece Part had written as a memorial to Britten, but heard nothing more of his music until the chance discovery of the cello version of Fratres, a slow meditative piece which the composer has arranged for many instrumental combinations. This I really liked - simple, but with a masterly grip of musical architecture.
So last Sunday's all-Part Manchester Camerata concert was the immersive experience for part-timers like me. What was it like?
Interesting and enjoyable. We got Fratres again, this time in a string orchestra version; I prefer the one for cellos, because the thumb-stopped harmonics at the start of the piece have a special unearthly quality that high violins can't match, but it's still very striking. There was a nice little unaccompanied choral piece sung by Vox Clamantis. Then the choir and the Camerata did the Stabat Mater, a longer and more substantial work, harmonically static, perhaps G minor this time, but often richly decorated. After the interval we had Da Pacem Domine, a minature version perhaps of the same idea, and then a much bigger orchestra arrived - triple woodwind no less - for Como cierva Sedienta, a solo motet for high soprano.
Como cierva Sedienta was perhaps the least successful performance, sometimes overscored and with the soprano inaudible in the lower register. I thought there was too much instrumental colour, like a pastiche of Richard Strauss with all the gorgeousness removed. Moreover the musical language seemed to reach back to the duller more romantic idiom of the Second Symphony. Music essentially lives and dies by the quality of its invention, and there was nothing in it I found memorable or interesting.
In the other more obviously liturgical pieces, scored for strings only, Part's ideas seemed to be better served by a narrower and more focused range of sounds. Their language suited his particular version of minimalism better too. You might describe it as Neo-Baroque if that didn't call to mind Stravinsky's hyperactive take on that idea nearly a hundred years earlier. It's less reliant on melodic ideas than Como cierva Sedienta, much more on Part's ability to spin extended musical paragraphs which sit there looking at the view.
Is Part a minimalist? Kind of. You could certainly walk in and out of the longer pieces without missing much. Perhaps that's the intention. My wife didn't think it was static music, but harmonically most of it is, very much so. Fratres was much the most inventive harmonically of the strings only pieces, but rests on a grounding open fifth in the basses; its tonality is never in doubt. The liturgical pieces had surface movement, but rested for very long periods in the same key. I was interested to find Part paying attention to the little orchestral details which composers use to help maintain the audience's interest. There were pizzicato punctuations in the Stabat Mater placed structurally in exactly the same way Elgar uses them in Nimrod. This was not ruthless minimalism of the Philip Glass variety, but minimalism in which the composer is doing his best to make sure the audience doesn't nod off.
But Part, like so many post-war composers, is either not very good at writing fast music or not very interested in it. I find a lot of Tavener's music too rooted in contemplation to make a whole evening's worth, and when Part did get busy in a couple of places in the Stabat Mater it was in brief flurries of elaboration rather than because the fundamental pace of events had quickened.
When conductor Gabor Takacs-Nagy, doing a fine job as usual, gestured towards the audience at the end, it took a moment for me to grasp that Part was actually there in the hall. I had no idea he was still alive, let alone in Manchester. To see this elderly chap, frail but still sprightly, make his way onto the stage was particularly moving. For one thing it was there that I last saw Tavener, only a few months before his death. But Part has made a great contribution to European music, and it was fantastic to see the hall - packed for contemporary music people like (as opposed to all the other stuff they don't but which gets foisted on them anyway) - rise as one in acknowledgment of his achievement.
Part, like all elderly composers, bore the marks of his struggle to produce great art, but also looked totally chuffed to receive the cheers of his admirers. As well he might.
