Ars Nova Singers and Arvo Pärt’s “Virgencita”

Posted July 7, 2023

New Video Premiering Friday, July 7 at 7:30pm

The latest in our series of videos from recent performance at The Tank will premiere on our YouTube channel this Friday. Join us online! This link will go live at 7:30 pm on July 7, 2023:

Ars Nova Singers performs “Virgencita”

Artistic Director Tom Morgan writes:
“This particular piece by Arvo Pärt seems like it was written for The Tank. The score includes 13 measures (interspersed throughout the piece) that the composer has marked “GP,” meaning grand pause. This in an indication from the composer that a silent break should be taken, at the discretion of the performers, to allow the music to breathe, to allow the sound to return toward the silence from which it came. In The Tank this can be a long time, but our 10-voice ensemble for this piece navigated it beautifully. For the video, I was able to incorporate some additional imagery to enhance the performance.”

“Virgencita” is a fairly recent piece, composed in 2012, and to date Pärt’s only choral work in Spanish. Pärt writes of this piece: “When Agustín Gutiérrez Canet, the Mexican ambassador to Estonia, invited me to Mexico, my interest and notions of the country were strongly affected by the famous legend of Juan Diego and his reports of the apparition of the Virgin Mary. The happy anticipation of being in Mexico very soon and the name Guadalupe left me no peace; they inspired me to write a choral work which I took along as a present to the people of Mexico.”  – program notes from the Arvo Pärt Center: https://www.arvopart.ee <https://www.arvopart.ee/