Perhaps there’s never been a more appropriate time for a music festival to take as its theme, “Border State”. Borders seem more prominent in world events than ever: we’ve seen them being viciously violated, vigorously reinforced, valiantly defended. Conflicts continue to rage, and the resultant feeling is one of separation and difference, suspicion and fear, where we become primarily aware of what divides us, instead of focusing on the things that we share and which bring us together.
One of the most interesting aspects of this year’s AFEKT festival, therefore, was the extent to which it demonstrated commonalities between diverse musical voices. Indeed, several events almost seem to have been deliberately planned to highlight these similarities.
The opening concert, with Ukrainian group Ukho Ensemble Kyiv conducted by Luigi Gaggero, was a good example of this. The paradigm for the evening was established by Helena Tulve in Languse ööl [At the Night of Decline] with slow, careful music, tremulous but not timid, forceful, even explosive, the whole ensemble moving as one. Tulve’s intuitive approach to composition is often directly embodied by her musical material: the ensemble, acting as a group, figuring out the way forward together. Eventually – after a wild chorus of loud bottle blowing – a song broke through, distorted (by effort? zeal?) but united. In Maxim Kolomiiets’ Vinyl Snails the ensemble was similarly united. Moving back and forth between ultra-soft, infinitesimal cluster streaks and forceful surges, Kolomiiets allowed the players some independence, though their tendency was to regroup to form halting but homogeneous ideas, which over time seemed to have been the aim from the start. Like Tulve, they too had a lyrical sensibility, but it was nicely complicated due to the way the music halted and looped round on itself, potentially ending up back where it started, an unexpected outcome that only made the piece more fascinating.
Alisa Zaika’s he only dreamed of places now… almost seemed to be a different articulation of the same idea, with a prominent thread again emerging from a volatile combination of tremors and assertiveness, leading to a decorative, somewhat static music filled with elegance and a sense of necessity. Jānis Petraškevičs (one of the festival’s featured composers) set himself slightly apart in Kārtības rituāli [Rituals of Order], establishing a different tone and character. The music cycled around as if underdoing the same earnest process of development from caution to passion again and again, though with its details continually changing such that we could never predict what was coming.
And then came Gérard Grisey, whose epic Vortex Temporum took the idea of unity and exploded it into highly energetic shards of activity. Ukho responded with flamboyance, clearly enjoying the work’s extreme shifts between acrobatics, jauntiness, fast and furious crashes, and (at the opposite end of the spectrum) bleak, darker music, in one memorable sequence being made to sound like a blank processional. But even here, we were conscious of a group regularly recalibrating, working together towards a shared musical narrative.
The concert given by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (ERSO), with conductor and pianist Michael Wendeberg, showed another kind of behavioural similarity, here expressed via different forms of texture. Kaija Saariaho’s was polarised in Ciel d’hiver, a high melodic idea passed between instruments within a deep, suspended atmosphere of light and scintillation, turning ecstatic and gorgeous. In Dead Wind, Jānis Petraškevičs went in the opposite direction, creating a texture of significant density, caught between tension and clarity, again defying our expectations. Helena Tulve’s Südamaa [Heartland] amalgamated the solo piano into the orchestra (not so much a concerto as a ‘noncerto’), sidestepping virtuosity in favour of large-scale bristling excitement, and, unlike Petraškevičs, an aerated texture. Most intriguing of all was the impression of something tangible at its core, hinted at through traces of line amid the restless activity. Ligeti’s Lontano transformed texture into an attenuated, brilliant light. Even as it developed, lines smearing into a vast, radiant smudgeblur, it was like a continuation of that same original light, finally vanishing as a vibration, dying in the air.
The exception to all this was Galina Ustvolskaya’s Symphony No. 3 (subtitled, “Jesus Messiah, save us!”), given a blisteringly intense performance with speaker Lembit Peterson. Texture was replaced by a desolate, blasted landscape, with plangency and discord etched into its broken, corrupted foundations. The ERSO brass section was especially strong, sounding with barely-contained, relentless hostility, answered by shrill, aimless woodwinds and pounding drums. In the midst of this pitiless space, Peterson cut an almost absurdly pathetic figure, capable of nothing more than simple honesty in the face of such stark, monumental adversity. Here, with brutal clarity, was the border state made manifest, a David and Goliath-like scenario, a lone individual making a quiet, final stand against the potential end of the world. The symphony’s outcome suggested the impossible: that the unfathomable aggression was capable of being – indeed, had already begun to be – overcome. Ustvolskaya’s music is so often simplistically dismissed as being austere and forbidding in extremis, yet here it was, speaking to past and present conflicts and providing that most vital thing of all: a tangible suggestion of hope.
The Estonian National Symphony Orchestra concert is available to stream for free on Klassikaraadio (audio only) and ERSO TV (video).
[…] places of confusion, uncertainty and, often, danger, and in this context concerts such as the ones previously discussed at AFEKT 2023 – where most works had strong similarities while one or two were markedly different – raised […]