Silhouette (Hommage à Gustave Eiffel)

Program notes

About the Work

Arvo Pärt has said that Silhouette began with a recording. He heard Paavo Järvi conducting one of his pieces, liked the performance enough to telephone him, and learned in the course of the call that Järvi was about to become chief conductor of the Orchestre de Paris. Pärt offered to write something for the new post, and looked for a subject that belonged to the city.

He found it on his desk, in a book of illustrations of Gustave Eiffel’s plans and working drawings for the tower. What struck him, he wrote in his note for the premiere, was Eiffel’s “combination of sober rationality and elegance”. An engineer’s tower and a piece of music seemed to him to have things in common: the way structural elements connect, the transparency of the construction, even stillness, which he called as important in music as in architecture. The subtitle, Hommage à Gustave Eiffel, names the dedicatee in spirit. The score itself is dedicated to Järvi and the Orchestre de Paris, who commissioned it.

The piece was finished in 2009 and first played on 4 November 2010 in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, by the Orchestre de Paris under Järvi. It is written for string orchestra and four percussionists and lasts about seven minutes. The Arvo Pärt Centre’s catalogue also records a revision in 2015.

Silhouette is not a typical piece by the composer of Fratres and Spiegel im Spiegel. Pärt’s music since the 1970s has mostly been slow, and built on a technique of his own that he calls tintinnabuli, from the Latin for little bells. This piece follows that technique strictly, according to the Arvo Pärt Centre, but it moves. “The piece came out short and light,” Pärt wrote, “like a dance, a waltz, something dizzying”, and he compared it to the winds that play around the tower.

For this concert the work comes back to the conductor it was written for, at the head of a programme that otherwise looks east, to Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

What to Listen For

The Arvo Pärt Centre describes a design in layers, modelled on the three platforms of the tower. A slow introduction sets out the material. Then the dance begins: plucked strings in light, unstable harmonies stand for the airy ironwork, and bowed passages in firmer harmony for the platforms where the structure comes to rest. The percussion, which includes vibraphone, tubular bells, crotales and gongs, adds points of metallic colour and never a beat to march to. A slow coda returns to the idea of the opening, so that the piece ends where it began, as if the eye had travelled up the tower and down again.