Arvo Pärt: Total Immersion, Barbican, review The life of so-called "holy minimalist" Arvo Pärt can seem very like the Buddha's. He struggled, he was enlightened, he found perfection. The struggle was against Soviet artistic tyranny, and Western musical modernism, which Pärt embraced for a while. Enlightenment was the realisation that total simplicity was the key. Perfection was a new method of uniting scales and arpeggios, in a way that made them sound mysterious. The great virtue of the BBC's day-long Total Immersion in Pärt's music last Saturday was that it gave this myth an interesting human complication. The First Symphony of 1963 - played in the main evening concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra - one expected to be a tormented symptom of stylistic confusion. In fact it was finely wrought, with a beautiful tranced contrapuntal web poised at its centre. One could glimpse the essential, contemplative Pärt through the unfamiliar sounds. Most of the pieces we heard came from Pärt's "post-enlightenment" period, but these too had their surprises. Pärt is a canny composer, not a mystic, and he knows the unspotted perfection of his new style could become wearying. He's not afraid to inject some drama, as in the Beatitudes, performed by the BBC Singers. First we heard the text chanted on a harmony that wound itself higher and higher by single, slow steps. Then the organ entered with a piercing quiet clarity, and led the harmony back to its origin. It was more astonishing than any thunderous outburst could have been. Conductor Paul Brough also showed an acute sensitivity to words, and in Summa one could feel the text's own rhythms pushing against the composer's. It gave a warm speaking quality to the rise-and-fall of the music. Preserving the radiant beauty of the music's surface, while allowing its suppressed emotion to shine through with undemonstrative seriousness, like a saint's gesture of blessing in an icon; this is the secret of performing Pärt's music, which the Singers certainly had. It was there too in the main evening concert, conducted by Estonian conductor Tõnu Kaljuste with extraordinary calm authority. The highlight was the riveting performance of Tabula Rasa. The dialogue of solo violinists Alina Ibragimova and Barnabás Kelemen was heart-stoppingly dramatic, but one could feel an essential stillness at its core.