Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt lived through times of remarkable change in the last decades of the Soviet Union. From the 1970s, state restrictions on religion were gradually relaxed and this was reflected in the arts and especially in music. Both composers began to incorporate religious themes into their work, moving away from the modernist abstraction that had characterized their early careers. Schnittke’s large-scale Psalms of Repentance were composed in 1988 for the celebrations of the millennium of Christianity in Russia. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Kaspars Putninš have chosen to combine Schnittke’s Psalms with two shorter works by Arvo Pärt.
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir: Music of Schnittke & Pärt
