Hot on the heels of the recent Estonian Music Days, there have been several interesting new releases of Estonian music. Among them is a new recording of Violin Concerto No. 2 “Angel’s Share” by one of the country’s most accessible composers, Erkki-Sven Tüür, featuring soloist Hans Christian Aavik with the Odense Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gemma New. This is a work i’ve got to know well over the last few years, which is somewhat unusual for Estonian music, but Tüür’s music tends to receive far more performances than almost all of his compatriots. So it’s interesting to consider Aavik’s new rendition of the work having previously spent time with performances featuring soloists Hugo Ticciati (the 2018 world première), Triin Ruubel-Lilleberg and Johannes Põlda (both 2020).
It’s nice to report that, with a couple of slight reservations, Aavik’s is by far the best. That’s not the case at all in the accompanying work on the disc, Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1. The first movement has a nicely tentative introduction, but feels underpaced when it gets moving; there’s something slightly queasy about Aavik’s use of vibrato in the central Adagio (something i also noticed during his performance of Rasmus Puur’s awful Violin Concerto a few years ago), and while the finale is nice enough, it’s not special or individual at all, making one wonder why Aavik chose to record it.
But things couldn’t be more different in Tüür’s concerto. It’s worth noting that underpaced aspect of the Bruch, as the Tüür is also interpreted in a way that heavily places the emphasis on the work’s lengthy lyrical sequences, with its rhythmic outbursts serving as digressive or diverting episodes along the way. That’s an interesting decision, and in the case of this concerto, i can’t help feeling it’s precisely what the piece needs. Tüür’s music has a strongly polarised mode of expression – fast and rhythmic or slow and thoughtful – with performers almost invariably tending toward the former rather than the latter.
That’s precisely the approach Ticciati took at the première, romping through the work in barely 22 minutes (the fastest performance so far), and while Põlda allows more push-pull, there’s a brashness to the rhythmic music that makes it sound dull and behaviourally limited (though Tüür’s music is often somewhat susceptible to this). By contrast, Ruubel-Lilleberg’s performance was much more contemplative, allowing time for the ideas to emerge and be considered, and made the work’s polarised nature sound like twin aspects of the same personality. Aavik does exactly the same, and much more besides, extending the concerto’s duration to over 25½ minutes and in the process allowing it to sing like never before.
This song takes its place within an environment that it is here made broad and spacious; indeed, the opening of the work is the best kind of tentative, from Aavik’s extended opening note – beautifully emerging from the ringing chime that begins the piece – through his violin’s high, cautious turning in the air, which together with slow rising glissandi in the strings sounds like a lovely kind of awakening. The entire opening section is highly arresting; by taking such time over it, it becomes charged with interest, we’re keen to know what this means, where it’s going next. The answer is slow to come; violin and orchestra rise together, somewhat clustery, a deep drone appears and we find ourselves in a place of gentle chords, soft and tender. Almost five minutes in, there’s really no indication that the concerto is going to be anything other than long-form rumination. It’s nice, and in Tüür’s music somewhat unusual, to experience this sense of space.
When things do begin to kick off, Aavik remains consistent in his attitude; other soloists practically leap in the air, but Aavik is appropriately low-key, allowing the Tippett-like rhythmic passages to get going, almost absent-mindedly, as if they weren’t so important. That’s reinforced by the fact that, just a few minutes later, the music becomes strikingly muddy, taking on a weirdly sluggish momentum, and even when rhythm regains its clarity, it’s articulated with a lightness that i’ve not heard in any of the earlier performances, tilting between slow and fast. One of the key benefits to this, setting it apart, is that these passages, particularly their recurring accents, don’t sound repetitive. They’re vibrant, vital, and in the process they make a pair of brief pauses that Tüür inserts around the mid-point all the more uncanny, all movement briefly frozen in a sustained vibraphone chord.
One of the issues i’d previously had with the piece was the subsequent drone-based sequence. It persists for several minutes and in some performances has seemed rather passive and uninspired. But Aavik and New keep it bristling with energy – it’s as if the music were held by some sort of tractor beam, at the same time invoking again that sense of breadth and scope indicated earlier in the piece. They clarify moments that hitherto seemed (deliberately) messy into something more meticulous, and the expansion they bring to this sequence makes the rhythmically-charged closing tutti exciting precisely because we feel we need it after what’s gone before. On the one hand, i do wish New had injected a bit of fire, and pushed the Odense Symphony Orchestra just a bit harder and faster here, rather than holding true to her and Aavik’s more measured, deliberate approach. Yet it means their performance is consistent throughout, and it prevents (as happened at the première) the piece ending up as a rather generic bit of tumbling velocity. Instead we come flying to another pause, another sustained vibe chord, which turns out to be the end – not breathless, as one might have expected, but breathtaking.
Released earlier this month by Orchid Classics, the album is available on CD and download.
