This extraordinary project, several years in the planning, brings together two of the world’s most influential and enduring cultural figures – Gerhard Richter & Arvo Pärt. MIF CEO & Artistic Director Alex Poots & Curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist introduce their new work presented at the Whitworth Art Gallery. ¹

The Guardian²

Judging by the warm smiles, joyful tears and gleeful hugs between them, Manchester international festival nurtured a profound friendship when it introduced two of the world’s great artists, Gerhard Richter and composer Arvo Pärt, and suggested they work together. It’s a match made in heaven.

Richter has a long, symbiotic relationship with music. One of his paintings was used as an album cover by Sonic Youth in 1988; a book of overpainted photographs in homage to Steve Reich followed and then came Bach (1992), four large abstract paintings, using strict horizontal and vertical lines to echo the order of Johann Sebastian’s genius. Fourteen years later, he became fascinated by the chance procedures of John Cage’s music and produced a cycle of six abstract “squeegee” pictures influenced by Cage’s compositional technique (and today on show at Tate Modern).

Curiously, Arvo Pärt straddles both Bach and Cage in that his music is largely tonal, strictly ordered and yet also experimental and thoroughly contemporary. Both Pärt and Richter are advanced in years and are the product of the turmoil of the 20th century; both brought up under difficult communist regimes and both deeply affected by the second world war. The parallels seem limitless.

The men met in Dresden in 2013 and immediately a rapport was obvious. Last year, Richter created Double Grey, four diptychs, each enamelled with a different tone of grey on glass. Then this year he produced Birkenau, four large abstract paintings, based, it is said, on photographs taken by a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. These now hang at Manchester’s newly extended and refurbished Whitworth Gallery, named last week as the ArtFund Museum of the Year.

They are wonderful creations; the deeply subtle Double Grey reflecting the streaked reds, greys, greens and blues of the Birkenau set. And yet they don’t truly come into their own until you hear Pärt’s response to them.

His piece, entitled Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fatima, is sung at intervals throughout the day. On preview afternoon last week there was no warning of its start; the singers of the Estonian choir Vox Clamantis mingled with the crowd and simply sang where they stood – an electrifying moment. It’s vintage Pärt; at first it could be a gentle, lilting folk-song as old as time but it unfolds into a multi-layered, densely harmonised acclamation of alleluia, which both triumphs over the horrors of Birkenau and bestows a profound nobility on the victims of that terrible place. From today for a week local chamber choirs will take turns to sing Pärt’s small gem of a piece. Lucky them. They will never forget it.

 

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1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsJuVgY9HkQ
2. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/12/gerhard-richter-arvo-part-review-manchester