My first impression of Toivo Tulev, established nearly a decade ago during my first few sojourns to Estonia, was of a composer whose language was one of polarised extremes. The more i’ve got to know his music over the years, the more that first impression has been confirmed: Tulev’s is among the most intensely concentrated music i’ve ever encountered, often centred on a tension that suggests timelessness while grappling with impinging forces that are all too time-bound. That’s the essence of the polarisation in his work; the extremes simply arise from a willingness – no, a need, i think – to articulate the tension through either delicacy or violence. There’s no middleground in Tulev’s music, no rest, no respite; everything, everywhere matters.
His work has been featured on a number of portrait discs, all of them testifying to his stature as a fearless, focused musical mind. Be Lost in the Call dates from 2004, exploring assorted chamber pieces, followed in 2008 by Songs, a thrilling performance directed by Paul Hillier of the eponymous work, one of Tulev’s most dramatic vocal works. A decade passed before Magnificat was released, an album demonstrating how different his approach to choral music is from his compatriots. And now we have Dawn, Almost Dawn, something of a low-key release that paints a very specific portrait of its composer, as a voice rooted above all in melody.
i describe it as low-key, not simply because its release a few months ago seems to have taken place with no fanfare whatsoever (indeed, i learned of its existence entirely by accident, despite being plugged into a lot of Estonian-related sources). More than that, three of the four works featured on the album are relatively restrained pieces for small groups of performers. They occupy the first, second and final positions in the tracklist, thereby giving the initial impression that this is going to be an intense but small-scale, intimate listen.
The opener, And I Loved You Like a Branch Breaking Under the Snow, dates from 2020 and is composed for scordatura violin (originally written for a kamancheh), string trio and piano. It’s a piece that goes a long way to demonstrating two key aspects of Tulev’s music. The first is an emphasis on line, in this case a highly fluid melodic outpouring from the scordatura violin. A mixture of gestures, arpeggios and the beginnings of phrases, they quickly form an elaborate solo, like diving straight into a cadenza. As so often in Tulev’s work, there’s a dronal aspect to this – implied more than directly heard – as the instrument uses the pitch C as a recurring reference point. It takes nearly four minutes before anyone else joins in – a tremulous moment, gently charged with thrill – though the involvement of other instruments is primarily to echo and reinforce the solo violin. Yet they do this not through mere imitation but by creating an exciting, single but multifaceted melodic thread.
Things change around the centre point, when the piano finally enters, its presence more actively changing the trajectory and the expressive tone. The piano presents folk-like fragments that for a while form the basis for dialogue and development. But this brief episode becomes all the more enigmatic as the strings, first as a group and then just the solo violin, assume dominance, revealing the piano to have vanished entirely. The thread continues, in a lower register than before, and with a halting sense of contemplation followed by a clear dronal underpinning (now the pitch G, though whether it should be regarded as an ‘imperfect’ progression – or indeed a progression at all – i’m not sure). A curious silence leads into an equally curious coda, where unity is coloured by surprising signs of energy, suggesting this ending is not simply (or at all) about peace and repose. That’s gently reinforced by the return of the piano, discreet but significant, again proving demonstrative in the work’s mysterious closing moments.
And I Loved You Like a Branch Breaking Under the Snow is fascinating in the way we don’t just engage with the material but with the way the material is presented. The scordatura violin is not just soloistic but literally alone for a long time, while the piano is absent throughout much of the piece, heard in only 33 of its 256 bars. It’s a highly unusual deployment of forces, one that compels us to consider more directly the music’s nature and narrative.
There’s a similar emphasis on melody in the title work which follows. Dawn, Almost Dawn dates from 2021 and was composed for the Turkish reed flute known as the ney. Intimacy becomes absolute here, progressing from just air noise to a breathy emergent melody. Buzzing resulting from sung notes sharpens the edge of this line, sometimes counterpointing it, and it’s periodically broken up by small vocal tics that act almost like literal punctuation marks. Our world seems to be defined by the limits of this melody, Tulev bestowing on it a profound sense of intense expression, driven by a passion that, later, emerges in a wonderful momentary splutterance of staccatos.
Fana, written in 2023, which closes the album, demonstrates precisely the same kind of melodic centredness. Composed for mezzo-soprano and viola, it features a single line of text, by Hazrat Inayat Khan, “Every tear in Thy love, Beloved, exalts my being.” Tulev fashions these words into a serpent-like contour, utmost tactile on the mouth and lips, the mezzo (mesmerisingly performed here by Iris Oja) lingering on consonants, vowels, syllables, as if in an act of worship. As with And I Loved You, the voice goes it alone for a long time – two-thirds of its duration – before the viola appears, almost literally materialising in a fuzzy trill before transforming into an increasingly high contrapuntal line, soaring to the heavens, before returning to earth to coalesce with the mezzo, where they end together.
These three pieces – each intense and passionate but restrained and intimate – frame the third track, Black Mirror, and on a first listen it’s tempting to assume they give no indication of what coming. On the one hand, that’s clearly deliberate, and in fact the order in which the pieces are placed is extremely effective, creating a distinct, highly dramatic narrative arc. This is strengthened by the rather bold decision not to name the album Black Mirror, as in every way this piece feels dominant.
Yet on the other hand, it’s impossible not to notice immediately the fact that Black Mirror shares many attributes. It also uses a non-standard, West-Asian instrument, the kaval, as a soloist alongside voice, baritone saxophone and orchestra. The piece also moves at a necessarily slow, steady pace, and as another demonstration of intensity it could hardly be more powerful. It’s true that i knew Black Mirror before listening to this album, but nonetheless i feel the other three works do provide some preparation for it. (Or perhaps it’s truer to say that, as Black Mirror – composed in 2016 – is the oldest of these pieces, the others show signs of what went before.)
All the same, in this context Black Mirror can’t fail to come as a shock. Gone is that sense of close intimacy, replaced by an oppressive atmosphere, with repeating wind clusters, lower strings brooding and upper strings suspended. A minor chord that can’t get comfortable, it’s as if the piece is beginning with an ending, draped in funereal garb. When the voice enters, it’s ostensibly not with song, but to articulate some hybrid of singing, keening, wailing, groaning and speaking. In this recording (as with the other ones i mentioned) the role is taken by Níkolái Galen, who embodies its multifaceted nature so completely he becomes like a prophet of doom, his words (and they are literally his words, as he wrote the libretto) narrating a litany of catastrophe, held in an apocalyptic anti-reverie for the end of the world.
His dehumanised words are pronounced slowly, both for emphasis as well as, seemingly, a product of extraordinary pressure, but they’re given more power by the instrumental forces. Most obviously the kaval and sax are close companions, reinforcing the vocal line and elaborating around it (similar to And I Loved You). A strange kind of semi-stagnant pulse can be felt, more in ragged swells from the orchestra than anything precisely metric, making it all sound like a procession inching forward. Thus a fascinating friction is formed, between the implied solemnity and profundity underpinning the music, and the increasingly raucous, desperate attitude unleashed by the soloists and echoed elsewhere. The voice sounds catatonic, dazed and repetitive, circling around an inverted paean decrying what’s at one point almost absurdly mildly described as “a bad kind of bliss”. It’s not just his text, but his whole reality that reflects an outlook of nothing but erasure and an eternal “back to zero”.
i mentioned earlier a tension in Tulev’s music, between timeless and time-bound forces, and in Black Mirror the former takes on a bleak projection of black infinity. Perhaps, in that sense, there’s no tension here – or a different kind of tension – as the two are not sonically at odds with each other. Yet tension unavoidably arises from the very act of expressing all this, from the tone of desolation and fury that permeates and very clearly impels each and every note. Plus there’s such a welter of beauty in Black Mirror – Tulev’s language has rarely been so ravishingly articulated – that the cumulative effect is not repulsive but engaging; we’re pulled in by the immense gravitational weight of the music and made to resonate with its vast emotional heft.
The conclusion is made poignant by the text invoking Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, where at the start the Norns spy a light in the distance and wonder, “is the day already dawning?” That’s an interesting sentiment at this point on the album, coming immediately after Dawn, Almost Dawn, and as in Wagner where it foreshadows a profound, fateful end, here too it causes the voice to push to a point where it sounds as if their vocal cords could snap.
Estonia has its fair share of radical composers, but i honestly wonder whether any of them come close to the fearless, single-minded radicality of Toivo Tulev. His approach to forms of tension where the transcendent and the transient are juxta- and superimposed is uniquely fascinating and highly effective, and tends to make his compositions feel more than usually immersive. He has, in my opinion, written many masterpieces, and Black Mirror is undoubtedly one of them (and led to his being awarded the Au-tasu prize in 2017). In the context of this album it works brilliantly, coming as the apex to an extended melodic focus, moving between adjacent, complementary states of intensity, into this impossible yawning void, after which comes a short, tentative epilogue suggesting, like Wagner, that beyond suffering and destruction, love endures. From that perspective, while Black Mirror remains devastating, it’s transient, not timeless.
Release by Navona Records in March, Dawn, Almost Dawn is available for download.
