Arvo Pärt honored with Praemium Imperiale
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt has been awarded this year's Praemium Imperiale Prize for Music, which is endowed with 110,000 euros and is considered a kind of Nobel Prize for the arts.
Other prizewinners are the French painter Martial Raysse, the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone and the American architect Steven Holl.
The Praemium Imperiale is awarded by the Japan Art Association under the patronage of the Japanese Imperial Family. It is being awarded for the 26th time this year. A total of around 130 artists have been honored to date, including Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti, Alfred Schnittke and Luciano Berio.
Arvo Pärt was born in Paide (Estonia) in 1935. After studying in Tallinn, he worked as a sound engineer at Estonian Radio from 1958 to 1967. In 1980 he emigrated to Vienna and a year later to Berlin on a DAAD scholarship.
He uses a self-developed compositional principle that he calls Tintinnabuli. It does not strive for progressively increasing complexity, but for extreme reduction of the sound material and restriction to the essentials.
