Two concerts of special interest that happen each year during the Estonian Music Days are those focusing on works by student composers. One of these took place in Tartu, at the Heino Eller Music School, being the final concert of the 2025 Young Composer competition. The requirements on this occasion were to write for voice, saxophone and piano, and the jury consisted of three composers, Madli Marje Gildemann, Liisa Hõbepappel, and Mari Amor.

The composers who had reached the final were of quite widely differing ages, so the music demonstrated varying levels of competence and personality. Of the ten pieces performed, by mezzo Iris Oja with Emily Urla and Jorma Toots on sax and piano, three were especially noteworthy. Väike öölaul [little nocturne] by Aino Rahel Aimla responded to a text by Andres Ehin by following the words rather than making them fit a preplanned design. The piece was therefore so rhapsodic it rather nicely took on the qualities of a stream of consciousness (something of a trait in Estonian contemporary music). One of my primary reasons for enjoying Lars Erik Lend‘s setting of Georg Trakl, Die Tote Kirche, was due to its engaging post-tonal language. On the one hand, this language was clearly borrowed from the twentieth century (somewhat redolent of Zemlinsky), yet Lend used it with an authenticity and spontaneity that felt convincingly personal. Sadly, neither of these two pieces were recognised with prizes, but it will be interesting to hear how these composers develop.

Fortunately, the most genuinely compelling work in the concert was awarded first prize. At last year’s final concert i’d been impressed by a piece by Georg Jakob Salumäe, and it was his new work Mitte meile, Issand… that was rightly judged by the jury to be best. The title translates as “Not to us, Lord…”, the opening words of Psalm 115, yet far from creating an expected, familiar expression of worship or adoration, Salumäe rendered the text as a desperate, somewhat broken, fraught utterance, looping at times as if caught in a rut. This rang very true to the emotional core of so many of the Psalms, where positive and negative sentiments are inseparable and compatible. Salumäe’s music was imaginative and original, and as part of his prize is a commission for next year’s Estonian Music Days, i’m already looking forward to what he’ll come up with.
The other student concert took place at the Estonian Academy of Music & Theatre, featuring premières of compositions by eight Academy students performed by the EAMT Sinfonietta conducted by Toomas Vavilov. Three were very good, one was interesting, three more were so-so – while the remaining one was simply deplorable: Igor Jaćimović‘s An Adriatic Fairy Tale…, a completely pointless neo-Romantic pastiche made unbearable by being so overlong. A student needing to pay a lot more heed to their teacher, it seems. Astra Irene Susi‘s Wave Toward an Eclipse took the form of a slow, mildly solemn but not sad processional, becoming contrapuntal at its centre, concluding with a slightly monotonous (though deliberately so) climax. In its first part, Xu Dong‘s Erosion was a nicely messy tangle of melodic strands, with Dong keeping things clear through a series of big swells, fading back to soft crackle and friction. The second part featured a progression from lines to chords, the ensemble now moving as a group, within which loose, ephemeral moments of melody could be glimpsed. Its slow, strong demeanour was abruptly altered, turning mysterious, ending in nothing but air and distant whirly tubes, all very effective.

A title like Antiphon suggests something mellifluous, but Erik Rauk‘s piece was all bustling impatient energy, imposing from the get-go. (It’s tempting to read the title alternately: anti-phon.) Skipping along over dotted rhythms from a militaristic snare drum, it took a detour into more clustered territory before sauntering back with a jaunty pace and an insanely effusive piccolo. Music without a care in the world? Or dancing on the edge of a precipice? The highlight of the concert was Merilyn Jaeski‘s tantalisingly titled Glassflakes on the Edge of Silence. Curiously tense ensemble writing was permeated with repetitions, echoed by electronic blips. Tendrils of line cut through periods of poised suspension, and everything about the piece indicated an interesting thought process at work, one that was prepared, at the end, to let blackness prevail.
Tallinn’s Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom was the unlikely venue for a concert given by Serbia-born, Estonia-based accordionist Momir Novakovic. It was a decidedly mixed bag. Jug Markovic‘s Fleece Beats suggested something etude-like – working through exercises, tremolandos, crescendos, fast repetitions, accelerating chords – its episodes bolted together rather primitively, eventually becoming rather boring. Even more testing was the first performance of 1984 by Aleksandr Žedeljov, the most simpletonian response to everything the museum around us stood testament to, reducing notions of oppression and freedom to a mundane, basic back-and-forth between brisk, metric material and slower, more extemporaneous music, all of it dynamically flat and uninteresting.
Tatjana Kozlova-Johannes‘ Horizon, faintly, also a première, brought to mind some aspects of her orchestral piece Light Enters Through the Crack, performed earlier in the festival. Slow-moving, complex harmonic configurations had the prevailing sense that there was something tangible behind or beneath all the clusters, and that what we were hearing was a blurred version. The centre of the work seemed either to confirm or at least answer this, becoming poignant when high, angular shapes materialised over a bass drone; was this what had been blurred before? The music lapsed back into clusters, ending enigmatically, somewhere stratospheric with low shivers below.

Perhaps my favourite piece on the programme was Kronostaas [Chronostasis] by Mariliis Valkonen, for which Novakovic was joined by four additional accordionists around the space (Darius Gustaitis, David-Ovid Komlev, Darja Golberg, Renats Vanags). Taking inspiration from the way the brain manipulates our perception of time, the work’s material toggled between pressing on and holding back, alternately dance-like and cautious. Time was given more free rein in due course, with lengthy playful rhythmic episodes interspersed with dense group chords and low pulsing clusters, in an entertaining interplay of machine-like regularity and pure whimsy.
Though i wish it were otherwise, the Estonian Music Days is not an international festival; it’s for the most part unequivocally Estonian – native ensembles performing native composers for native audiences – and throughout the 10 years i’ve been attending they’ve made almost no accommodation whatsoever for non-Estonian speakers, so its outlook feels emphatically inward. The appearance of none other than the Arditti Quartet was therefore something of a (very welcome) departure. Despite the incongruity, in many respects this was the most stunning concert of the festival, simply due to the Ardittis astonishing transparent virtuosity, which made all five pieces on the programme utterly compelling.
That being said, i’ve never been able to fully parse Helmut Lachenmann‘s String Quartet No. 3 “Grido”, and even though it’s ‘their’ piece (composed for the Ardittis in 2001) and their performance of it was stunning, i still couldn’t. i love its soundworld of illusions, glimpses, half-impressions, shivering motes of ideas, like some kind of swirl of subatomic particles; and i love the way things become more tangible (or we shrink down), becoming hectic but unified, presenting something like a synthesis of what went before. But beyond all this i lose my bearings, and i did here too, so i guess this particular narrative is one i’m going to have to keep working at.
Toshio Hosokawa‘s Silent Flowers was an arresting, vivid display of halting, extreme stress, distortion and discomfort everywhere. Even when pitches could be sustained they spoke as anaemic, disoriented, dissonantly swelling, thereafter becoming sticky, as if the players were trying to free themselves. Not entirely dissimilar was Nina Šenk‘s engrossing To See a World in a Grain of Sand. After a dazzling tilting between close pitch undulations and intricate individual passages, with parts spiraling off, the filigree eventually seemed spent, coinciding and fusing. Yet this immediately fragmented in a frantic energetic sequence, the quartet seemingly chasing something, until, again, they came together and fused, now in a strong unison. The conclusion was curiously subdued (around a low, slow, microtonal cello) with remnants of filigree sounding distant, like a memory.

The concert provided a rare and invaluable opportunity to hear two quartets by Estonia’s pre-eminent composers, Toivo Tulev and Helena Tulve. Tulev’s Neither this nor the further shore, composed 25 years ago, was beautifully fluid, with moments of coalescence occurring seemingly spontaneously from its fast flowing material. His music often inhabits a liminal space, where turbulence and stillness can be perceived as opposites, yet also, for want of a better word, complementary. And so it was here, with sudden stability replacing fleet volatility, as if underlying everything was something precious and timeless. Thereafter, though, a sense of struggle permeated the work, veering between clarity and instability, with an inner sense of frustration manifesting in loud repeated accents, as if trying to hammer something home. (The work’s coda, featuring spoken words from a tape, was a bafflingly unnecessary intrusion into such a well-conceived and executed musical narrative.)
Tulve’s nec ros, nec pluvia… [neither dew nor rain…] was similarly volatile, with sounds that spoke and sounds that didn’t. What emerged was tense, wavering, projecting a line that was at once passionate and precarious. It continued into what sounded like a refracted image, each player doing the same thing, articulating the same idea and / or material but from a different angle, forming an oblique music. The fact that faint traces of line could be made out from the tremulous aftermath seemed implausible, eventually both sagging and soaring to a place beyond pitch. Amazing.
Some of the performances from this year’s festival are available to stream (for free) as audio via Klassikaraadio. Links below:
Young Composer Final Concert: audio
Arditti Quartet: audio