Back in the heady days when I was a composition undergrad, full of that unique youthful blend of enthusiasm and arrogance, I loved student concerts. Hardly surprising really, as they were my concerts, occasions when me and my friends would present the latest fruits of our wayward whims. Nothing changed during my time as a postgrad, but by the time I started my Ph.D., i was surprised to find there was a palpable sense among some of my colleagues that these concerts were to be avoided, precisely because of that same youthful mixture and its fruits. But personally, I’ve never lost the love; I’ve always been conscious of, and keen for, the possibility of the surprise, or the shock, of being mesmerised by something unexpectedly wonderful from younger artists. To be fair, that doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it can be genuinely miraculous. i’ve come to think of it like an extreme form of panning for gold.
I was reflecting on this during the days I spent last month in Tallinn at the annual COMMUTE festival, featuring compositions and performances by students and graduates of the Estonian Academy of Music & Theatre (EAMT). i’ve attended the festival on previous occasions, when it overlapped with the Estonian Music Days, but this year COMMUTE preceded it, enabling one to appreciate and appraise it better on its own terms. The first, and perhaps more important, thing to say about it is that it doesn’t feel like a student-based festival. The professionalism is absolutely top notch, and the level of commitment and determination to present a first-rate music festival is highly impressive. Also, it’s more than just music, describing itself as a festival “of sound, visual and music technology”, in which audiovisual works – comprising either video or theatrical elements – are featured prominently.
As one might have expected, there were times when the enthusiasm outstripped the works’ effectiveness. This was particularly the case in the event titled “Fons Amoris”, in which Vivaldi’s Sinfonia in B minor and Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater were given some light show treatment courtesy of Hele-Mai Vettik, Uku Õunapuu, Sandra Leon and Emilio Casaburi. Everything about it seemed off, from the inclusion of Baroque music in a contemporary festival to the null manner in which the visuals were imposed upon it. The concert, conducted from the harpsichord by Borrelli Pierfrancesco, was a collaboration between EAMT and six Italian conservatoires, the orchestra comprised of staff and students, and as such the performances were, at best, adequate. The exception was soprano Ilaria Monteverdi, who provided an intensely powerful focal point for Pergolesi’s emotional heft (by contrast, mezzo Claudia Marchi’s enormously unstable vibrato turned every line into the most queasy wobbling contour). The Vivaldi is so short that the accompanying visuals didn’t really stand much of a chance, but as it was, trying to connect the sequence of random, mostly static green blobs with the Sinfonia’s two movements was a challenge i completed failed. The Pergolesi faired better, inasmuch as the scope of the visuals was very much wider, more imaginative, and at times, very impressive. However, too often they were hampered because of a simple, fundamental disconnect. Pergolesi’s music has structure, shape, direction, both within each movement and throughout the work as a whole, whereas most of the visuals had been constructed as behaviourally static concepts – at times resembling being inside a lava lamp, or passing through a torrent of corpuscles – that, having been established, continued round and round without any sense of progression or development. Occasionally there were hints in the visuals at the work’s religious and emotional themes (pious figures, crosses), but even here a sense of connection to, let alone enhancement of, the music remained more-or-less implausible.
An infinitely more successful marriage of sight and sound took place on the opening night of the festival, in an event titled “Intersectio” held in Tallinn’s beautiful old Sõprus cinema. The evening – the first to show off the venue’s brand new 4K projector – comprised a series of short audiovisual works. Many of these were outstanding, among them Riccardo Tesorini‘s Rather than fall, a curious, dirty melange of found footage and photos, all dated (possibly from the ’70s), arranged to form a fascinating sequence by turns abstract and representational. Both visually and aurally it was highly dramatic, demonstrating a real sense of tactile pleasure in its handling of film. More abstract and yet all the more striking was purpose by Uku Õunapuu, receiving its première. Powerful, with an intense electronic score, its level of aggression was matched by its tone of mystery. Meaning remained remote yet if anything that only made it more compelling. i wished that Emilio Casaburi‘s Light Me Alone had lasted longer; as it was, its 4½-minute duration, passing from angst to something more eloquent and elegant, felt like the tantalising prelude to a much more expansive narrative. Another excellent miniature came from Elia Dell’Orco, whose HUMAN. was an arresting visual exploration of the body from a host of different perspectives and vantage points, embellished with a forceful and sensitive electronic soundscape.
Easily the most playful piece was Breed by Yiyang Sun. Mischievous and irreverant, it took a surreal yet beautiful approach to its contemplation of breeding as a scientific process, with a lovely sequence focused on (or through) a microscope. But the most visually stunning work on the programme was the unwieldy-titled Surfaces & Textures #2.0_earthy by Carlo Siega. Part of a series of works exploring “the inner relationship between the real and its digital representation”, it played out as both a study and a celebration of trees and plant matter. Accompanied by a granular noisescape – like an impossible field recording of the unhearable sounds and processes of nature – it was absolutely beautiful to behold. Film and music were perfectly blended into an exquisite ballet of evolving and variegating particles taking ever new semi-/pseudo-concrete forms, continually evoking the natural world, ending in a dark, non-naturalistic yet (super-?)natural place of peace.
