On 10 February 2009 ECM Records have released the latest recording with works by Arvo Pärt. The album, entitled Arvo Pärt: In Principio features orchestral works and music for choir and orchestra. It includes the following pieces: In principio, La sindone, Cecilia, vergine romana, Da pacem Domine, Mein Weg and Für Lennart in memoriam. The performers are the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste, the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra.
The CD is to be released on 3 March 2009 in the UK and the US, and can be pre-ordered from Amazon UK and Amazon US
ECM Records promo site for this release

Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, premiered the fourth symphony by Arvo Pärt on 10 and 11 January 2009 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Symphony No. 4 for strings, harp and percussion, labelled "Los Angeles", is dedicated to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, currently in a Russian prison, and to "all those imprisoned without rights in Russia". The symphony is 37 minutes long and therefore considerably longer than his previous ones. Arvo Pärt attended the premiere in Los Angeles in one of his rare visits to the United States (see photo © Gina Ferazzi / LA Times).
Read article from Los Angeles Times

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir are currently on a tour of the United States and Canada. They will be performing throughout November in Washington, DC (9/11), Cincinnati, OH (11/11), Ann Arbor, MI (13/11), Cleveland, OH (14/11), Ithaca, NY (16/11), New York, NY (17/11), Kutztown, PA (18/11) and Toronto, ON (20/11). Their programme includes works by the Estonian composers Arvo Pärt and Erkki-Sven Tüür. See the Concerts section for date and venue information.

In honor of Arvo Pärt's 75th birthday in 2010, abstracts are invited for possible inclusion in a collection being considered for publication by a major international publisher and for presentation at a symposium on the composer to be held in Boston, MA in 2010.
Abstracts of around 250 words on any subject related to Pärt and his music will be considered. Possible topics include:
Biography — Pre-tintinnabula works — Analytical studies of individual works or groups or work — Pärt and twenty-first century spirituality — Comparative studies (for example, different settings of the Passion with Pärt's Passio) — Pärt and the new minimalists (for example, Tavener and Górecki) — Pärt and popular culture — Pärt's choral music — Pärt's film music — Analyses (especially those that define new methodologies for analyzing the tintinnabula works) — Performance practice — Reception history.
The deadline for abstracts is ongoing and interest and questions may be addressed to the editor, Andrew Shenton (shenton@bu.edu), at any time.
Abstracts should be emailed as Word attachments and should include the author's institutional affiliation (if any) and contact information. Details of the symposium will be announced in the spring of 2009 with a final call for papers in the summer of 2009 and announcements of the papers included in the early fall of 2009. The exact date of the symposium has yet to be finalized. Details will be posted as they are available.

The Compositions page of this website is now (almost) complete, with references to 84 works by Arvo Pärt, spanning his entire career. The page is sorted by date of composition in descending order (most recent first). Each entry contains information about the composition date, title, source, duration and text (in the case of choral works). In most cases, you can also find the score catalogue number with links to purchase them.

The Sonning Music Foundation will be awarding the composer Arvo Pärt the Léonie Sonning Prize — the most important distinction in the Danish music world — on 22 May 2008 at a celebratory concert in Copenhagen, conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste. Besides Cantus, L'abbé Agathon and In principio, the programme also includes the première of These words..., a new 15-minute work for strings and percussion. It is based on the human foibles mentioned in the old Church Slavonic prayer from the Canon to the Guardian Angel. A separate concert will also take place on 20 May, with a full programme of Pärt's works by the Ars Nova Choir and the Athelas Sinfonietta under Paul Hillier.

The celebrated conductor Mstislav Rostropovich has died today at the age of 80. The maestro died in Moscow after a long illness. He was born in Baku, Azerbaijan (then USSR), in 1927, and started learning the cello at the early age of 10. He studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers were Shostakovich and Prokofiev. He lived in exile in the United States between 1974 until the fall of communism. During this time he conducted the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC. Rostropovich's cello repertory was vast and included works by the great composers of the 20th century: Schnittke, Britten, Lutoslawski, Shostakovich, Messiaen, Prokofiev and Arvo Pärt, among many others.
Obituary: Mstislav Rostropovich (BBC News)

The Best Choral Performance Grammy was awarded to Paul Hillier, conductor of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, for Arvo Pärt's Da Pacem. The 49th Annual Grammy Awards were handed out on 11 February 2007 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. Da Pacem includes the first commercial recordings of Zwei schlawische Psalmen (Psalms 117 and 131) and was released last September by the label Harmonia Mundi.
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