As i mentioned previously, this year’s combined Baltic & Estonian Music Days took place in the southern city of Tartu, due to it being one of the three 2024 European Capitals of Culture. To mark the occasion, Märt-Matis Lill composed an elaborate fanfare to herald the start of the festival, in the process embracing the city’s architecture and landscape. His new work, Emajõe kutse [Call of the Emajõgi] namechecked the river running through the centre of Tartu, performed by two singers (soprano Iris Oja and mezzo Yena Choi), three trumpets and two trombones situated across three towers that dominate the city’s skyline: the Town Hall, St John’s Church, and the Tähetorn, an old observatory situated on top of the historic Toomemägi hill, which was also the point from where we listened.
As it turned out, the work’s title seemed to have had an effect on the elements, as the wind blew the sounds from the church and Town Hall away from us towards the Emajõgi, leaving the performers on the Tähetorn as the most clear. Yet this stretched connection only seemed to make its music more vivid and fascinating – and, paradoxically, connected – as the distant sounds appeared to echo or foreshadow those closer to us. In practice it was much less a fanfare than a kind of spatialised ritual, slow and thoughtful, heightened by quasi-dronal elements that made it seem both resolved and poised to resolve at the same time. Due to the unpredictable vicissitudes of the weather, Emajõe kutse was performed a second time later that day, with all the performers brought together and dispersed around the interior of St John’s Church. It was genuinely like listening to an entirely different piece. Now its music was no longer elusive and stretched but concrete and immediate. On the one hand, i couldn’t help feeling it worked better when the brain filled in the blanks from the outside performance, yet heard here Emajõe kutse had so much more power. Indeed, now it really did fully resemble a fanfare, an overwhelming one with soaring vocal lines and slow trumpets underpinned by trombones intoning in the depths. It was extraordinarily visceral.
Also performed on top of Toomemägi hill, but at the other end of the festival, was a concert given by Tempus Balticus, a trio of performers from Latvia and Estonia. It took place in the imposing Tartu University Museum, attached to the ruins of the city’s 13th century Cathedral, and featured music with similarly Estonian and Latvian connections. Unfortunately, some of it was just as ramshackle as the environs. Consensus by René Eespere was a work that could only be considered “new” because it literally was, receiving its first performance; beyond that it was an exercise in the most old-fashioned, conservative musica generica that, for all its borrowings, couldn’t even manage a convincing conclusion. Platon Buravicky‘s Scent of Celestial Flowers was similar, bland, noodly, safe and far, far, too long, while Pärt Uusberg‘s Meditation on Spiritual Paths was even worse, a repetitive, empty-headed bore that sounded no better than the most average student composition.
Something more intriguing came from Ukrainian composer Karmella Tsepkolenko, whose Where the Sky Disappears, also a première, offered nothing so straightforward or easy. This was a deeply enigmatic music, full of vitality and energy yet, initially, providing no clear way beneath its surface. It became especially curious following a climax, whereupon the material got stuck in a loop before exploding. Definitely a work that left me wanting to listen again as soon as possible. The same went for Trivertimento by Estonian Kristjan Kõrver, a new work contemplating lightness and simplicity. It was a strangely volatile music, yet with a calmness that at first seemed to be its default position. Over time this became less certain, as pitches began to be pulled around, the texture pulled apart and wild eruptions ensued. None of this felt like the product of external forces, but integral to the work’s language and behaviour, highly spontaneous, constantly impelled to become something different.
On the same day, down the hill in the Heino Eller Music School, Estonian pianist Sten Lassmann gave a lengthy recital. Is it a problem when performers want to speak to the audience? i guess it isn’t, usually, yet Lassmann had so much to say – all in Estonian, of course – in an already overstuffed programme, that he actually had to omit one or two items in order to keep the concert to a reasonable (90-minute) duration. Lassmann’s performance encompassed both 20th century and contemporary Estonian music, the earliest of which, as well as the most intriguing, was Mart Saar‘s Skizze [Sketch]. Composed in 1910, the piece was a fascinating, free atonal oddity, with elements of Romanticism and Impressionism materialising along the way. The title indicates exactly what the music sounded like: an exploratory journey, as if Saar was harmonically experimenting to see what would happen. Best known as Estonia’s greatest symphonist, Eduard Tubin proved no less engrossing in his short Three Preludes from 1935, the first a rich nocturne, the second passionate and delicate in equal measure, with jazz-like progressions in a slightly brooding atmosphere, and the third filled with vigour and a hint of wistfulness.
One of the most striking inclusions in the concert was Lepo Sumera‘s Sonata, evidently composed in 1971 when the composer was in his early 20s. According to Lassmann, it was composed for his father (Peep Lassmann) but there are no records of him ever performing it, and until recently the piece had been completely forgotten, with even Sumera’s daughter (pianist Kadri-Ann Sumera) unaware of its existence. Regardless of whether or not this was the actual world première, it had all the electricity of a first performance. From an uncertain opening the music developed a stodgy kind of confidence, somewhat obsessive in the way the left hand fixated on circling patterns while the right hand was more searching. Though an early work, it already showed clear signs of the metronomic focus that typifies so much of Sumera’s output, with pounding rhythms and regularity spiced with syncopations and, towards the end, flamboyant arpeggios.
Lassmann brought things up to date with two premières, from Alo Põldmäe and Riho Esko Maimets. Põldmäe is one of Estonia’s compositional elder statesmen, and has taught many of the country’s younger generations (including Helena Tulve). His new work Solar Flare Chant was weighty, serious, intense, with some stunning, unexpectedly fierce passages, yet also displaying real tenderness. The highlight of the concert, though, was floating, adagio by Maimets. The power of the piece clearly emanated from the fact that Maimets had set out to compose one thing (“something bright and whimsical”) but ended up writing something very different, when his plans became derailed due to contemplating the ongoing effects of war. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, floating, adagio sounded tentative, even a bit stuck, not simply presenting but actively grappling with its own material. This continued even as the music in the uppermost registers became more and more rapid, a peculiar effect, as if this didn’t equate at all with freedom or flow. This was reinforced in the left hand, its slow, halting movement conveying real tension and volatility. It was a polarisation that ultimately made the work’s title ring hollow, being music emanating from an intense inner conflict, heavy, painful and difficult.
These performances are all available to stream (for free) either as audio via Klassikaraadio and/or as video via the festival’s EMP TV service. Links below:
Emajõe kutse: audio [at the start of the Altera Veritas concert]
Tempus Balticus: audio / video
Sten Lassmann: audio / video
