Arvo Pärt Festival at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, St. Mary’s Cathedral, Kaul Auditorium Reed College, Studio 2 & Northwest Film Center Portland: Feb 5 - 12

This month, the Portland ensemble Capella Romana presents the first-ever North American Festival dedicated to the work of Sacred Minimalist and Estonian Orthodox composer, Arvo Pärt. As a professional vocal ensemble that performs early and contemporary sacred classical music, the ensemble is known especially for its presentations and recordings of medieval Byzantine chant, Greek and Russian Orthodox choral works, much in the way of Pärt's regular collaborators, The Hilliard Ensemble. The form of the larger percentage of Arvo Pärt's work came after a period of creative crisis and reflection following his 1968 "Credo", and transitional "Symphony Number 3". Previous to this 1971 orchestral work, Pärt had explored a range of styles influenced by the early 20th Century Soviet era works of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Bartók. A brief period of exploring Serialist and Twelve-Tone methods informed by the techniques of Arnold Schönberg was to follow. These shortly proved to be both a creative impasse, as well as drawing undesired attention from the Soviet authorities, as detailed in "Oxford Study of Composers: Arvo Pärt" by the composer's biographer, Paul Hillier. His course out of this impasse came in the study of Plainsong, Gregorian Chant and the emergence of early Polyphony in the European Renaissance. From this the creation of Pärt's defining tintinnabuli style (from the Latin for “small ringing bells”) was generated. An approach which the composer has described: “I work with very few elements – with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of the triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation”. The creative breakthrough enabled him to resume composing and a stream of what are considered his masterpieces followed, with "Tabula Rasa", "Fratres", "Spiegel im Spiegel" and the "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten", written in rapid succession in the mid-to-late 1970s. These all finding a home in the west on the groundbreaking Nordic jazz and contemporary classical label, ECM. Dana Jennings "ECM: Albums Know that Ears Have Eyes" for the New York Times, mines the ensuing four decades of output from the label, including the vast majority of Arvo Pärt's catalog of recordings.

While this month's event marks the first domestic festival dedicated exclusively to his music, there have been numerous performance series and showcases of the Estonian composer's work stateside. Notably a series in Manhattan at the time of the extensive New York Times Magazine feature of 2010, "Arvo Pärt: The Sound of Spirit". New York again hosting 2014's Carnegie Hall week of performances comprising the Arvo Pärt Project by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. Which was covered in The Times feature, "His Music, Entwined With His Faith: At Heart of Arvo Pärt’s Works, Eastern Orthodox Christianity". One of the great chroniclers of 20th Century classical music, Alex Ross, host of The Rest is Noise, produced an exceptional overview of the composer's life and work for The New Yorker, "Consolations: The Uncanny Voice of Arvo Pärt". Ross also present at the Pärt's 80th birthday celebration throughout the city, which included a 24 hour marathon on New York's WQXR and New Juilliard Ensemble concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Outside of New York, other notable events have included, "A Symphony for Los Angeles, Just One Otherworldly Delight" presented in Los Angeles Philharmonic's Mozart & Pärt Festival of last year. The United Kingdom has played host to some of his most significant works, including 2015's Manchester International Festival. Wherein the composer collaborated with Abstract Expressionist painter, Gerhard Richter producing a work grappling with differences in art’s direct messages and allusions, "History is Everywhere and the Present is Fleeting". Alex Ross again playing a pivotal role in London Southbank Centre's 2013 The Rest is Noise Festival featuring Pärt among a set of Eastern European composers in a showcase titled, "Late 20th Century Politics and Spirituality", on the changing political and social landscape of the 1970s and 80s shaping of the era's mood and music. Pärt's home country of Estonia is no stranger to his works, this past year saw the release of "The Lost Paradise", a documentary on the famously media-averse composer's collaboration with director Robert Wilson. Framed around the staging of “Adam’s Passion” featuring three key works by Pärt in Tallinn's Noblessner Foundry, a former submarine factory. Its creation is followed in documentarist Günter Atteln's account of their time together during the many months of the project's genesis and development, "My Year with Arvo Pärt: He is a Man of Courage, Humility and Authenticity".

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia", Corinna Belz's "Gerhard Richter Painting" & Jeonju Digital Project 2011 at Northwest Film Forum: Mar 21 - Apr 15

After a 3/4 of a year wait, the Cannes Grand Prix winning film by what I consider to be Turkey's greatest living filmmaker is finally here stateside, screening for a week at Northwest Film Forum! Nuri Bilge Ceylan's previous film "Thee Monkeys" was more of a brooding psychological thriller as a 'ghost story' of a family's haunting by their lost son and the torment of his memories. The previous two, were more straight-up methodical dramas taking place in vast open landscapes and color-desaturated urban scenes; "Distant" and "Climates" both exceptionally well executed, yet left me wondering if these were the exception, why is it there is such a dearth of intelligent, quiet, sometimes existential, dramas that told true to life stories? ...And I guess we know the answer to that. As simple as his work is in it's formula, Ceylan is one of the true global cinema artists working in this realm, where the conceptual, aesthetic, and spacial; both psychological and material - all come together to ad up to something more on the screen. From the Northwest Film Forum: "The plot of this co-winner of the 2011 Cannes Grand Prix is simple: a group of men search for a corpse. But the story is not so straightforward. Set against the haunted and monotonous landscape of the Anatolian steppe, the task of finding the body is cloaked in lies, mystery and a growing unease. The film dips into both the road movie and police genres, but the investigation within the film is purely figurative, unearthing questions of human existence."

Of course best encapsulated by Manohla Dargis for The New York Times: "Mr. Ceylan doesn’t trumpet his ideas, but lets them quietly surface, often through the stories that the men tell one another and that at times take the form of parables. In one, a driver, Arab Ali tells the doctor how he likes to drive to the countryside for target practice, just to let off some steam. Enveloped in darkness, the wind rising like sighs, Arab Ali at first registers as a somewhat buffoonish, borderline-dangerous character whose Hobbesian worldview (it’s shoot or be shot) is a reminder that this is, after all, a search for a murdered man. Yet, like the doctor, the prosecutor and the police chief, Naci, Arab Ali proves more complex than he seems because his words are those of a man puzzling through the meaning of life. Words can fail the men, whose stories of lost wives and other ghosts drench the movie in an acute sense of loss, one that is offset by the effulgence of the natural world, a gift that none seem to see. The dead haunt “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” but so does beauty. At one point, after several futile attempts to find the body, the men drive to a village. There they are greeted by its leader, or mukhtar (Ercan Kesal), who, amid a hospitable meal, tells the travelers that the town needs a new morgue. Most of the young people have left, he says, and when an old villager dies, they beg to see the dead one last time, holding onto a past that fills them with longing. And then the mukhtar’s beautiful daughter joins the men, her face bathed in a light that until then has eluded them."

Two other notable pieces of cinema grace the Film Forum in late March; the first being the 2011 installment of the Jeonju Digital Project hosted annually by the International Film Festival of the same name in Jeonju South Korea. Previous year's installments have introduced me to such favorite directors as Naomi Kawase and Lav Diaz, this current installment though is more established names in art-house cinema. Featuring Claire Denis, Jose Luis Guerin & Jean Marie Straub of the great husband-and-wife cinema duo Straub-Huillet. The second film being the documentary on the works/process of German neo-abstract expressionist painter Gerhard Richter. It seriously being THE year for Richter, with a retrospective at the Tate a exhibit of similar scale in Berlin and gracing the cover of last month's Artforum and the documentary "Gerhard Richter Painting" all of this on the year of his 80th birthday! Nice to see the deluge of attention focused on what I consider to be one of the greatest visual artists, of any medium this century. From the Northwest Film Forum: "Gerhard Richter, one of the most significant contemporary artists of our times, granted filmmaker Corinna Belz access to his studio in the spring and summer of 2009 as he worked on a series of large abstract paintings. Gerhard Richter Painting offers rare insights into the artist’s process with a quiet, fly-on-the-wall perspective. The paintings themselves become the protagonists. Gerhard Richter Painting is the penetrating portrait of an artist at work - and a fascinating film about the art of seeing."

Olafur Eliasson, Felix Schramm, McCall & Knoebel - New Exhibitions currently at SFMoMA

Quality and varied series of exhibitions currently on display a SF MoMA. All involving different
takes on the perception/experience of the viewers relation to physicality vs. intangibility -
explored in space, architecture, light and texture. From the abstraction and immersive glow
of light from the Olafur Eliasson, to the laser-like perception altering qualities of the McCall/
Knoebel, to the physicality of the architectural collisions between host-space and installation
of the Schramm. Not since the Gerhard Richter "Forty Years of Painting" exhibit of 2003
have I had such a complete, richly stimulating, thoroughly inspired day at the museum.
I have many and much in the way of words to say concerning these exhibitions, and the
memorable experience had seeing/engaging with them last week - but I'm going to leave
all the wordage this time to SF MoMA:



Link to SF MoMA "Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson" site

"Widely heralded as one of the most important artists of his generation, Olafur Eliasson nimbly
merges art, science, and natural phenomena to create extraordinary multisensory experiences.
Challenging the passive nature of traditional art-viewing, he engages the observer as an active
participant, using tangible elements such as temperature, moisture, aroma, and light to generate
physical sensations. The works assembled for this presentation — the first U.S. survey of this
Icelandic artist's oeuvre — date from 1993 to the present and reflect all facets of his creative
practice. Encompassing sculpture, photography, and large-scale immersive installations —
including a newly commissioned kaleidoscopic tunnel that envelops the Museum's steel
truss bridge — these projects are intentionally simple in construction but thrilling to behold,
sparking profound, visceral reactions designed to heighten one's experience of the everyday."



Link to SF MoMA "New Work: Felix Schramm" site

"German artist Felix Schramm creates the illusion of architecture gone awry. Made from drywall,
paint, steel frames, and wood, his site-specific installations resemble the aftermath of disaster
inside the gallery, where the delineations between the work and the institution's architecture are
difficult to discern. His twisted, splintered fragments of structural forms — walls, ceilings, floors
— burst from the building's framework at dramatic angles, producing large-scale works that seem
at once threatening and fragile. For his installment in SFMOMA's ongoing New Work series, Schramm
presents a new piece that continues his pursuit of achieving balance between chaos and order, the
particular and the universal, and offers visitors an experience of physical tension in the Museum's gallery."



Link to SF MoMA "Project, Transform, Erase: McCall and Knoebel" site

"Anthony McCall and Imi Knoebel both have used deceptively simple projections with strikingly complex
effects. You and I, Horizontal (2005), a digital projection — and recent SFMOMA acquisition — by McCall,
draws on his 1970s-era solid-light film installations to create an engaging experience of light as a three
-dimensional beam and wall animation. Projektion X (1971-72) and Projektion X Remake (2005), two
versions of the same video concept by Knoebel, each feature a continuous stream of nighttime
streetscapes, illuminated only by a powerful X-shaped beam of light."