While the theoretical theme of this year’s AFEKT festival was music theatre, in practice what was projected strongest was intimacy, in terms of one-to-one communication. This was due to the fact that the festival focused primarily on solo performances given by, among others, members of Ensemble Musikfabrik, and even in larger scale events the significant role of soloists meant that this directness of personal musical contact remained consistent and strong.
There’s a difference between directness and clarity of message, though, and in the case of Essential Fears, a multimedia work by Einike Leppik, it was impossible to figure out what she was driving at. Twin narrative threads were interwoven, one an anecdote concerning Alexander the Great seeking out water that would grant immortality, the other someone overcoming fears of water and learning to swim. Two stories linked by water, and fears of death, yet their realisation could not have been more opposite. The narratives never merged, and were instead presented like disjunct works taking turns to be heard, with a simplistic musical language (marred by painfully old-fashioned sampled stuttering in the Alexander account) and elusive, often baffling staging that left one wondering what was the point of it all.
Somewhat more engaging was what followed, Fabrizio Nastari’s chamber opera A Student’s Tale. Comprising Nastari’s final doctoral presentation, this was about as meta as it could possibly get. The libretto was a veritable litany of the woes and worries of a student, getting to grips with their subject and – far more demanding – the world of academia (the musicians all wore industrial coveralls and hard hats, overtly indicating the possibility of danger and injury). Musically it was unremarkable, with a punchy, slightly edgy score redolent of what Steve Martland or Michael Nyman were doing in the 1980s. One assumes the work was intended as an extended exercise in irony – in no small part due to its overwhelmingly prosaic subject matter (or, more specifically, overwhelmingly prosaic libretto, which in its own words hinted that it had been created by ChatGPT, which would be all too believable). Yet A Student’s Tale was hampered by an evident inability on Nastari’s part to decide whether its tone should be comedic or serious. It was at its best doing the former, particularly in an amusing sequence where an unseen academic Dean got carried away with the sound of her own, over-Romantic voice. The work was carried by soprano Annabel Soode, whose tour de force performance often made one forget completely its shortcomings.
Another multimedia evening focused on the work of Estonian composer Ardo Ran Varres. This included two scenes from his music theatre piece They Went and Planted the Seeds of Shadows Because the Light Started to Sprout, a work i own on CD and assume therefore that these scenes had been reconfigured slightly for the evening. Singer Iris Oja and cellist Aare Tammesalu gave a rendition of these scenes that was impassioned, scene V playing with Romantic tropes and allusions while scene IV was beautifully adorned with a drone from two temple bowls. i confess i’d forgotten the texts, and as no translation was provided it was impossible to engage fully with this performance. However, more telling was Force Majeure for cello and tape, a work that, among other things, questioned the connection between acoustic and electronic. The latter droned, shimmered, and put out bursts of pseudo-noise, while Tammesalu explored an elaborate melodic train of thought. Only when the tape part featured percussive piano sounds, triggering the cello to switch to ricochets, did the two parts become a more meaningful duet, concluding dramatically with wild angular gestures from Tammesalu’s bow, before both voices receded, the tape into lowercase quietude, the cello to faint sustained tones.
Most striking of all was The Anonymous Whistleblower for piccolo, live electronics and wind chime, performed by AFEKT festival organiser Monika Mattiesen. Her florid stream, initially articulated with beautiful clarity, was periodically disrupted by bursts of flamboyant coughing; the electronics echoed and distorted her actions, turning a sudden cry of anguish into an ear-splitting chorus flooding the space. This relationship with the electronics seemed increasingly fraught, from a potentially sympathetic force to one that sought to swamp and overwhelm, drowning her out. The conclusion was unsettlingly placid, Mattiesen turning attention briefly to the wind chime, before continuing with breaths and trills and finally turning away, suggesting that, while whistles can and should be blown, it’s dangerous and they’re not always heeded.
The largest scale event, given by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (ERSO) conducted by Clement Power, also demonstrated the greatest levels of ambition at this year’s festival. It was Monika Mattiesen herself who arguably went furthest in this respect, in a new 45-minute semi-theatrical work, Ariadne aus Neanderthal, exploring the notion that we have three souls: male, female and neanderthal, the last of which “is older than the person themselves, at least as old as the Neanderthal. When the male and female souls don’t know what to do, the Neanderthal soul comes to their aid. This soul is the Neanderthal Ariadne.” This was articulated in an almost overblown sequence of episodes mingling spoken, sung, solo, orchestral and electronic elements. There was a sense of the speaker (Mait Malmsten) learning utterance, while the music progressed from an absolutely dazzling primordial introduction into a palpable sense of urgency, littered with ticking, clicking, col legno and other pitchless or only faintly-pitched noises, ending up like a queasy squeezebox.
From this nascent lyricism the work unfolded in an always heightened mode of expression that deftly moved between considerable widespread complexity – where the ear was deliberately pulled in numerous directions – and intimate chamber passages, focusing around the figures of Musikfabrik’s Hannah Weirich, Carl Rosman, Marco Blaauw and Benjamin Kobler. One of the most telling was a kind of askew communal ‘song’ from these soloists comprised of multiple non-tunes superimposed on a constantly tilting lower string foundation. The work’s musical language was an arresting form of pre- and post-sophistication, continually posing the question: what if music had evolved differently? Is this what it might sound like? The visual – and, to an extent, aural – focal point of Ariadne aus Neanderthal was a large hybrid instrument-machine, within, around and upon which the soloists performed, culminating in something akin to an eccentric, multi-faceted cadenza. In hindsight it was surprising that the speaker, though central on stage, was generally a mute figure, less the driving force of the convoluted narrative than an occasional commentator on it. The last in an apparent trilogy (concerning “a journey from distant history towards a future mythology”), the exuberant imagination of Ariadne aus Neanderthal was such that it’s going to take many more listenings / viewings to begin to tap fully into its rich tapestry of musical and textual ideas. Yet while it overwhelmed, it was also by far the most memorable new music i experienced during AFEKT, not only showing enormous ambition, but also an eagerness to go far beyond the prevailing politeness, restraint and order that typify so much Estonian contemporary music. Its conclusion was unforgettable, another strange melody, this time spreading throughout the orchestra in octaves, caked in noise, rising and attenuating into high resonance before evaporating completely.
The same concert saw the first performance of a new symphony by Elis Hallik, titled Phos. Though the country has a rich history of symphonic works since the early 20th century, this is surprisingly only the fifth time that an Estonian woman has composed a symphony (following those of Els Aarne (1961 and 1966), Ester Mägi (1968) and Mari Vihmand (1990)). In using the Greek word “phos” (φῶς, light) for her title, Hallik was seeking to tap into both literal and figurative meanings, describing her work as “a journey toward the essence and meaning of light” encompassing “both physical and spiritual light”. Anyone calling a piece “symphony” inevitably takes on something of the legacy that that word connotes, and it’s to Hallik’s credit that this is far and away the most ambitious work she’s ever composed.
That being said, it’s not without problems. The symphony’s 30-minute span falls into three roughly equal movements, the first of which indicates that Hallik’s approach is less about ideas that feel sonically corporeal than with shifting, semi-tangible atmospheres. In lesser hands that would become half an hour of disposable, quasi-cinematic blah, so it’s encouraging that Hallik has bigger aspirations. The opening movement presents what amounts to a vaporous tension, established right at the start in a polarised opening that sounds at once soothing and threatening, and which elaborates into adjacent notions of propulsion and stasis, neither of which dominates. There are some allusions to melody in the violins halfway through, but these are notional strands that prove inconsequential. Instead Hallik pushes things in the opposite direction, in a punchy, mildly aggressive sequence, but this also peters out.
There’s already a frustration arising from this, a sense that this symphony of atmospheres, despite its beauty and imagination, might turn out to be a weak equilibrium, where nothing really matters, and that avoidance of concrete forms simply sounds, in every sense, insubstantial. It’s not helped by the central movement, which really does feel like a lengthy period of treading water. A climactic release never came in the first movement, and it doesn’t come here either, despite several occasions when Hallik builds things up only to put them, like everything else, to one side, in favour of something vague or distant or tremulous. One senses Hallik’s hope is that the ambiguities of the material, in the way she’s articulating them, will be sufficient to hold our curiosity and interest, and while that’s true up to a point, the sense of a music going in circles, of never amounting to anything unequivocal, definitely starts to test one’s patience in this movement, all the more so as on at least one occasion the impression of things being pent up, in desperate need of release, is conveyed very clearly.
The final movement does, finally, provide that badly-needed eruption. There are more than a few hints of Erkki-Sven Tüür in some of the figurations through its opening minutes, yet this doesn’t detract much from the bold, powerful strength being shown here, dissonant and turbulent, energised to the point of becoming slightly intimidating. This, too, is a rare example of Estonian new music that’s prepared to go genuinely big, and focus on ideas that are raw and savage. As in the first movement, there’s a corresponding tension here, where factions in the orchestra seek to quell the ferocity via that most simple of means, a suspended note. Not only does this appear to work, but it leads to a wondrous episode of radiant trilling, switching away from the brute solidity of the movement’s opening (perhaps the only concrete music in the whole symphony) in favour of something more directly light-related, de- and re-focusing. The conclusion is unfortunately weak: earlier in the symphony, Hallik uses a sawing arpeggio idea in the strings, hackneyed in any case, but overworked here, particularly in these closing minutes. It’s a symptom of the fact that Phos, as a whole, in its deliberate avoidance of the tangible contains a great deal of gestural ideas, but despite its flaws, the symphony certainly makes an impact. It may not be Hallik’s finest composition, but in the large sweep of its huge dynamic and behavioural contrasts, it’s impressive, and shows what she’s capable of at her best. i hope there’ll be a Symphony No. 2 someday.
The ERSO concert is available to stream (for free) either as audio via Klassikaraadio and/or as video via the orchestra’s ERSO TV service.
