Arvo Pärt

Born in Paide, Estonia, Arvo Pårt is one of the 21st century's most widely performed composers. He came of musical age under Soviet occupation and studied composition at the Tallin Conservatory, where his early experiments with serialism brought a mixture of praise and condemnation from the Russian-dominated cultural authorities. Intimidated temporarily into silence, he worked as a radio producer before, in the 1970s, refining a new compositional style that he described as "Tintinnabulation" – characterised by radical textural simplicity and a tonality inspired by the sound of bells. Together with Pärt's new but deeply-held Orthodox Christian faith, this evolving language powered an ongoing series of works, beginning with Fratres (1977), Tabula rasa (1977) and Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977) that would take his name into concert halls around the world. The following decades saw him produce several meditative large-scale choral works (Passio, 1982; Miserere, 1989; Berliner Messe, 1992) as well as four symphonies. While some of his eclectic, inventive early works (Collage über B-A-C-H, 1964) are still regularly performed, the emotional conviction and surface tranquillity of his mature works (irreverently described by some commentators as "holy minimalism") continues to win a uniquely wide and appreciative global audience for music whose spirituality is anything but dogmatic - and whose economy of gesture underpins an artistic vision on the most expansive scale.