Two of the events at this year’s Baltic & Estonian Music Days were especially memorable. The first was given by one of the finest choirs in the world, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Conducted by Mai Simson in the somewhat simple, functional interior of Tartu’s otherwise imposing St Paul’s Church, they performed five works, each of which was in its own way outstanding. From an aesthetic perspective, Iridescence by Justė Janulytė was the odd one out, simply because her music sounds like absolutely nobody else’s. As ever in her work, the piece was a cloud of timbral similarity, with an omnipresent, paradoxical sense of both movement and stasis. It was like a mobile, rotating yet never quite appearing the same on each rotation. The quasi-equilibrium of this wondrous sonic vision was subtly changed later when occasional higher notes appeared, causing gentle clashes, yet these too were folded back into the texture. This was liminal music, neither resolved nor unresolved, existing somewhere in between. Andris Dzenītis‘ 2013 Diptych, setting words by Dorothy Walters and W. B. Yeats, was altogether more harmonically defined, though its sense of rapture led to large tilts between tonal stability and rich ambiguity. In the same way rhythmic certainty was undermined, boldly taking the music through strange passages where, for a time, it was entirely unclear how we got there or where we were going. This was at its most effective in the extended conclusion of the first part, ‘A Cloth of Fine Gold’, where the music abruptly entered a paradisiacal place of pure ecstasy.
Marianna Liik‘s Psalm 38, 39, a first performance, not only abstracted its text, but also exploded and dramatised it. Words and syllables were transformed into sharp whispers and even sharper points of pitch. It was a relief to hear these words – some of the most depressingly self-loathing in the entire bible – in nothing like a remotely conventional setting, but made into something altogether more fascinating and personal, far removed from the moribund clichés of sacred music. Liik’s music didn’t directly express the text but used it as a springboard for extensive imaginative vocal play and exploration. The only drawback in this otherwise seriously compelling work was its coda, a short, uninteresting chant-like recitation of words from Psalm 39. Personally, i hope Liik will remove this unnecessary epilogue; Psalm 38 worked brilliantly well, and much more powerfully, by itself.
Maria Kõrvits‘s music often inhabits introspective, nocturnal soundscapes, and that was again true – in both title and character – of her new work Night. O you …, also a première. Setting words by Rainer Maria Rilke in English translation, the music acted as a dialogue with the night, in a similarly slow, solemn, stately way that by now feels like a distinct Kõrvits fingerprint. However, as the words continued, becoming more profound (and, by implication, overwhelmed), the harmonic language became increasingly remote and strange, far from the familiarity of its starting point. The work’s climax, an impassioned sequence with high, strong sopranos extruding through the texture, ran the risk of becoming a touch grandiose, but succeeded due to the obvious depth and weight of the music and its subject.
Yet more powerful – the most powerful music of the evening, in fact – came from Evelin Seppar who, as she has previously, turned to words by Jaan Kaplinski in her piece Iris. The text, a celebration of the eponymous flower, speaks of blossoming and ascent, which found a perfect counterpart in Seppar’s music. Overlapping rising phrases in the women initially floated freely until becoming rooted by the men, yet even now everything stayed in motion. The entire texture was busy, active, with a palpable sense of excitement within. The trigger point came with a sudden soaring upward to a moment of octave unison, before passing beyond into a network of high melismas, passing even beyond this into rich, polarised chords and, finally, a sense of stability and peace. In an instant, all movement was practically gone, simplified, slowed and softened into a gorgeously radiant warm blur.
The other specially memorable event was the recital given by Anna-Liisa Eller & Taavi Kerikmäe. Their performances have become a real highlight of the festival each year, bringing together kannel, keyboard instruments and electronics in a contemplative combination of old and new music. The concert took place in Tartu University Museum, and though it wasn’t explicitly stated, the temperament of the occasion was overtly dark and foreboding. It’s important to remember that Estonia is still a nation that only relatively recently managed to regain its independence, while its geographical neighbour continues today to play the most unhinged game of belligerence (indeed, only a few days ago, Russia removed some of the border markers between Estonia). It’s hardly unreasonable for memories of the past and reflections on the future to make their presence felt in Estonian music-making at present.
Apropos: in a concert where every piece hit hard, arguably the hardest of them was Eller and Kerikmäe’s arrangement of the Adagissimo from J. S. Bach’s Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother. Beforehand, Kerikmäe recounted the famous tale that Bach composed the work for the occasion when his brother was leaving to join the military band in the army of Charles XII of Sweden. This was in 1704, during the ongoing Great Northern War, and Kerikmäe pointed out that at the very same time, and in the very same war, Tartu itself was attacked and captured by Russian troops in June of that year. Four years later the city was destroyed and its citizens deported to Russia. It was with that sobering memory in mind that we heard the Adagissimo, yet after a couple of minutes, as Eller progressed through its forlorn, falling phrases, it seemed as if something had gone wrong. Located behind a bank of electronics, Kerikmäe seemed only to be eliciting odd hums and stray hanging tones, suggesting some kind of malfunction. Except the music was going somewhere radically different; as Bach’s chromaticism became more extreme the hums began to throb, and as the music reached the end and began again, its entire tone and tenor transformed. Expanding into overdrive, Eller now wielding a hand-held amplified kannel, the duo encrusted the music with noise and rage, like black jewels adorning a funeral cortege surrounded by the wildest keening. Eller and Kerikmäe have presented many deeply moving renditions of earlier music, but few as extraordinary and emotionally-charged as this.
Where the Bach had been an ever-increasing outward statement of fury, Helena Tulve‘s new piece Elegeia for kannel and harmonium was demonstrably internalised. Initially the relationship between the two parts was difficult to discern, Kerikmäe caught up in chords and clusters, Eller in filigree and flourishes. Over time, though, the two felt connected, with the kannel acting as a focal point for the harmonium’s hard-to-penetrate density. As such, they could almost be thought of as being in a semi-conventional melodic / harmonic relationship, though this was kept elusive due to the way in which the piece projected dual airs of necessity, with the players each engrossed in their own material. Regardless of how one construed the dialogue between them, what they together added up to was an abstract music, nonetheless laden with uncomfortably heavy emotional weight. It wasn’t so much fluid as viscous, not flowing but oozing, progressing slowly, haltingly, with a prevailing sense that it could stop at any moment.
Darkness also permeated A Place Unfound for kannel and piano, the latest work by Tatjana Kozlova-Johannes, whose music in recent years has tended to be shrouded in forms of shadow. The programme note suggested destruction, returning somewhere to find it now either replaced or in ruins (not a million miles from UMS ‘n JIP’s works related to Rolf Hermann’s poetry), though Kozlova-Johannes extended this concept to somewhere inside ourselves, a place of “lightness” no longer found within. Here too, there was a strong sense of independence in the players. Not at first, both preoccupied by small, high, decorative phrases and glissandi, sounding like tiny cries or mewls. Thereafter, though, the piano developed confidence, even swagger, leaving the kannel halting and uncertain. This was subsequently balanced by a tremulous piano passage where the kannel took priority, leading to an intense, accented duo sequence filled with what felt like fast, agitated frustration. As the music fell back again, it seemed clear this was not a depiction of loss but a reaction to it. Though never obviously melancholic, the sense of disorientation and brooding through the work’s closing minutes – both players increasingly sounding as if they could not continue – made the nature and potency of its emotional content inescapable.
In an inspired last-minute addition to the programme, Kerikmäe followed A Place Unfound by segueing into Giacinto Scelsi‘s Un adieu, a piano work the composer apparently wrote to be performed at his own funeral. It played as if from within the darkness created by Kozlova-Johannes: sombre, subdued, strange, kind of tragic – and yet, somehow, as if it were also smiling. Together with A Place Unfound, it was the high point of a concert all about lows, emotional heaviness and barely-contained grief and distress, yet conveyed with such beauty and authenticity that everything about it felt necessary and vital. In hindsight, this concert was perhaps the truest utterance, and clearest definition, of Estonian and Baltic music at present, coming from a place of resilience in the face of historical trauma and oppression, with threats continuing to lurk ominously just beyond their borders.
These performances are both available to stream (for free) either as audio via Klassikaraadio and/or as video via the festival’s EMP TV service. Links below:
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir: audio / video
Anna-Liisa Eller & Taavi Kerikmäe: audio
