Anniversaries were the focus at this year’s Estonian Music Days festival. The festival’s theme, ‘Sada’ (100), celebrated the centenary of the country’s Composers’ Union. There was therefore something of a retrospective flavour to certain aspects of the festival, revisiting significant works in addition to paying tribute to various notable figures from the past hundred years. i had my own personal dimension to this tone of retrospection; this was the 10th iteration of the festival that i had attended, giving me pause to reflect on a decade’s worth of experience of Estonian contemporary (and non-contemporary) music, along with the constant reminder that I still feel very much like a beginner.
As if to provide immediate context, and something of a point of origin, for Estonian classical music, the festival opened with one of its earliest ambitious examples, Artur Lemba‘s Symphony No. 1, composed in 1908. It’s a work that in some ways poses more questions than it answers. Performed by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Wendeberg, its credentials as a cogent and compelling symphony were unequivocal. Yet considering the country’s uniquely fractured relationship with the developments of European classical music, in tandem with (opposed to?) its own potent form of folk music, it’s hard to know both where on earth the work came from, and indeed why it didn’t immediately lead to similarly ambitious works from other Estonian composers (the nation’s symphonic tradition didn’t begin until Tubin got going in the mid-1930s).
The remainder of the concert took the form of a procession of premières, each piece a tribute to another composer, though how thrilled all the assorted dedicatees would have been is hard to say. Rasmus Puur‘s Where You Once Came From, That’s Where You’ll Go (for Tarmo Lepik) demonstrated again his peculiarly messy approach to composition, in which either the ideas feel like they’re in there but are hampered by his orchestration (the same problem that afflicts his Symphony, which in an inexplicable act of misjudgement, was awarded this year’s composition prize during the festival), or the music reverts to a simplistic blankness where nothing grabs the ear. Mari Vihmand‘s …the golden sun as seal (for Eino Tamberg) was so anachronistically conservative in its language it seemed genuinely bizarre to be listening to it as something purportedly ‘new’ in 2025, while Timo Steiner‘s Coffee with Rääts (for Jaan Rääts) took his usual unsophisticated approach of forgettable froth peppered with childish bombast.
The standouts – and, mercifully, there were some – came from Märt-Matis Lill and Tatjana Kozlova-Johannes, two of Estonia’s most consistently outstanding composers. Kozlova-Johannes has been ploughing a particularly dark musical furrow in recent years, and to an extent her new work, dedicated to Helena Tulve, continued this trend. Light Enters Through the Crack takes inspiration from Tulve’s early work for saxophone quartet Öö [night], particularly the end of that piece where (echoing its start, but slower) loud clusters repeat like a rude alarm. Likewise, Kozlova-Johannes built her music on repeating clusters, initially light and agile, becoming large, hefty and dissonant. A textural sequence that followed went the same way, with solo wind phrases leading to stratified density. Music with almost a complete lack of rhythmic content, it arrived at a potent place of stillness mingled with nervous tension.
Lill’s works often occupy a similarly enigmatic place of deep shadow, and that permeated his homage to Lepo Sumera, Epilogue. Its tone of dark mystery, rather ominous, suggested that melody might emerge – but no, instead the music took a turn for the portentous. Was this an epilogue, or an epitaph? The music became serious and solemn, even grave, overlapping fragments of line articulated by muted brass, surrounded by timpani and bass drum strokes, with hovering strings making everything icy and austere. Before i’d even realised it was happening, all pitch content had been entirely erased. It was a superbly effective work of profound, provocative disquiet.
More tributes came in a concert given in St John’s Church in Tartu, the country’s second city, by the Estonian National Male Choir, conducted (with such efficiency he became practically transparent) by Mikk Üleoja. Though not advertised as such, it was an evening dedicated to one of Estonia’s more lively composers, Raimo Kangro (who died in 2001), and his students. As if throwing down the gauntlet, they opened with Kangro’s own setting of part of the biblical Song of Songs, expressed with a fascinating mixture of mesmeric repetitions and lengthier melodic strands, all infused with large amounts of energy, even when, later on, Kangro broke things up and became more thoughtful.
Not everything in the concert lived up to such bracing imagination. Not Aare Kruusimäe‘s simplistic responses to folk melodies; not Timo Steiner‘s occasionally interesting but otherwise rather generic, stylistically-erratic Songs of Wisdom; and certainly not the two works of Tõnu Kõrvits to which we were treated (Triptych of the Moon and Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night). Considering i once quite admired his work, it’s been appalling to witness a composer not merely rest on his laurels but actively hibernate within them. Today, he’s undoubtedly the Eric Whitacre of Estonia, churning out endless, predictable waves of soft emptiness and saccharine mush. The choir could have been singing anything: Kõrvits’ music made no attempt to meaningfully capture, articulate or even respond to the texts’ words, thoughts or emotions. Instead we were force-fed a large helping of Kõrvits’ grossly oversimplified, stupified reduction, designed to be endlessly reheated and served to unthinking minds and ears. A revolting display of complacent, cynical creative laziness.
The highlights, though, were nothing short of magnificent. They came from Ülo Krigul and Tõnis Kaumann, two composers who each embody a curious admixture of emotional depth and mischief. The less impish of them were Kaumann’s Song of Hannah and Moria mai. The former moved between harmonic stability and slithery passages whre solos and small groups broke out, rooted in a verse-refrain structure but nicely undermined by an irregular pulse. The latter was a kaleidoscope of gorgeous, unexpected harmonies, managing to suggest security while remaining unstable, concluding in playful rhythms while amusingly repeating the name “Raimo” like a fevered mantra.
Krigul’s short work Das ist des Jägers Ehrenschild is a setting of the poem (by Oskar von Riesenthal) printed on bottles of Jägermeister. While the words speak of ethical hunting practices, Krigul’s emphasis was more on their alcoholic context, causing the choir to utter them with such robust vigour they sounded even more overtly masculine than normal. Various different simultaneous tempi sprang up, but by the end the chorus had unified into what sounded like a huge drinking song, managing to sound more than a little inebriated. Glorious.
Choral concerts are always a highlight of the Estonian Music Days, but the only other such event (both the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Vox Clamantis being absent this year) was on the final day, given by the Vicentino Singers. Much of the programme was the same as i experienced at Musica Nova in Helsinki a couple of months ago, making for an interesting game of compare and contrast. (The game was made more challenging this time due to most of the sung texts not being provided.)
i’d been impressed previously by their rendition of Helena Tulve‘s You and I, which turned out to be reimagined and enhanced due to the reduction to just six voices heard in a dry acoustic. On this occasion, situated within the somewhat claustrophobic environs of Tallinn’s Kloostri Ait – with an acoustic not so much dry as entirely dead – that effect was extended. Now, the clarity of the clusters in Tulve’s vocal writing was more vivid than ever before, as was the fluidity with which the music moved in and out of harmonic certainty. Even more unadorned than the already austere Helsinki performance, here the piece was achingly intimate, excruciatingly tactile. It’s left me wondering whether all that ostensible richness achieved when performed by large choirs in big spaces results in something that completely misses the point. Perhaps that’s the acid test for all choral music: perform it with zero reverb, and hear what’s actually going on.
i wrote previously, of the Intermezzi by Tze Yeung Ho, how much i’d like to hear them again. i can’t necessarily claim the experience was better in Tallinn – the lack of words created an inevitable distance of engagement – but what was remarkable was the extent to which Ho’s music proved to be no less engrossing. The longer the work continued, the more one felt entirely convinced of inhabiting a large, strange but consistent soundworld, continually revealing new aspects of itself (such a the whistling that only appears in the fourth movement), and always articulating a unique, increasingly familiar form of avant-lyricism. Though often baffling, i almost didn’t want it to end.
The Vicentinos also gave the première of L’infinito by Liina Sumera, a composer i’ve been wanting to hear a lot more of and who finally seems to be getting more opportunities. From the outset things were heightened, dynamically restrained but buzzing with intense passion, the women in such close proximity that they resembled a single voice split three ways. As it progressed, this impression expanded so the sextet gave the sense of six individuals and a single group simultaneously, with points of coalescence coloured by subtle harmonic ambiguities. Held in place by a drone from the men, the women launched into wild swoops and ululations, whereupon L’infinito improbably took on the qualities of a madrigal, particularly bringing to mind the locked-in intensity of Gesualdo, especially at its end, with all six voices sliding around together. Yet more proof that Sumera is one of Estonia’s most radical, forward-looking composers.
Some of the performances from this year’s festival are available to stream (for free) either as audio via Klassikaraadio and/or as video. Links below:
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra: audio / video
Vicentino Singers: video
