When i first started visiting Estonia, exactly 10 years ago, one of the first things i realised was the extent to which choral music has a special place within the country’s history and culture. At this year’s Estonian Music Days it was once again given a special place, focused upon in three very different concerts.
The simplest of them was also the festival’s opening concert, given by the Ellerhein Girls’ Choir. It was striking the degree to which music from the past was reanimated in the present. Context was provided by Mart Saar, his 1924 Nature’s Greetings to the Sun like an unusually chromatic hymn mingled with folksong-like mannerisms (Saar was an early collector of folk music). And then came the master, Veljo Tormis, with the triptych Summer Motifs, part of his 1969 four-season cycle Nature Pictures. The choir revelled in the opening movement’s dreamy, balmy, languorous atmosphere (corresponding to ‘Dry Weather’), before getting animated through the ensuing ‘Thunderstorm’, picking up pace as textures became broken and a persistent rhythmic cell popped up everywhere, becoming the shifting bedrock below melodic lines. The concluding ‘Summer Night’ was rendered like proto-Eric Whitacre but with a soul, filling St John’s Church with radiant clusters.
It was disconcerting to hear how much of this was reheated in the two premières that followed. Mariliis Valkonen’s A Leaf of Memory Bloomed on the Tree of Life occupied itself with chanting either in separate hocketing groups or a united chorus. The basic harmonic language made one wonder whether, as with Tormis, the words were regarded as paramount rather than the music. Certainly, the passage that followed, with rhythmic patterns below sustained ideas above, seemed like a direct Tormis reference (hearing Summer Motifs beforehand made the imitation all the more obvious). Only in the climactic tutti did Valkonen step just a bit further away from simplicity, and the same was even more true of Kristo Matson‘s Mis oli enne mind [what was before me]. Though his inspiration was ostensibly different, the work was even more strikingly similar to Summer Motifs. The latter two of its three movements, ‘Viies põlv’ [the fifth generation] and ‘Ma tahan uskuda’ [I want to believe] were clearly Tormis-derived, comprising soft, slow, basic chanting, sometimes split into upper and lower layers. It was hard to know what point there was to Matson (and, to some extent, Valkonen) composing this. What did it contribute? Why did it need to exist? Homage? Pastiche? Knockoff? Only the first movement, ‘Olles vihmana teel’ [being on the road as rain], demonstrated anything approaching originality, a rather beautiful, slow meditation, tender in every sense, with hints of pain, ending with a surprisingly effective emulation of rainfall via finger clicks and body percussion.
As for the rest, Arvo Pärt sounded like Arvo Pärt – in aeternam, ad nauseam – while the late Urmas Sisask was represented by Benedicamus Patrem, a teeth-grittingly egregious slab of bombast. Vacuous fluff from start to finish, in a permanent state of being ramped up but in the process revealing its emptiness ever more clearly. A genuinely nauseating display of completely overblown idiocy. At the end, people whooped and cheered. Of course they did.
The last, also the most arduous choral concert, featured two choirs, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Iceland’s Cantoque Ensemble (who made a very strong impression on me during the 2022 Dark Music Days). Most of this concert was a genuine trial to sit through, in no small part due to the poor design of the pews in St John’s Church, meticulously constructed so as to project outwards into the upper back and thereby make it impossible to sit comfortably. A genius example of ‘hairshirt furniture’ if ever there was one. More seriously, though, three of the four works performed were fundamentally problematic. First, regardless of its supposed merits – and by my reckoning they’re few – Frank Martin‘s 1922 Mass for double choir has no place in an Estonian contemporary music festival. Second, Hugi Guðmundsson‘s Three Marian Antiphons for two choirs (receiving its first performance) was simply lacking in any originality whatsoever, rehashing excessively overworked tropes and coating them in nauseating quantities of sugar syrup. Text with no meaning set to music with no point.
Third, Helena Tulve‘s whopping great 30-minute Song for All Beings, also a première, came as a real shock in being so misconceived. Setting a simply enormous text, it progressed as a turgid, syllabic recitation, akin to a sermon being delivered one word at a time. After only five minutes it already felt exhausting, all the more so as the work relied on harmony for everything, being otherwise rhythmically, dynamically and dramatically flat. Coming across like an extended exercise in low-key, even passive-aggressive hectoring, it’s one of the only occasions i can recall Tulve making such a drastic conceptual error. i’m reminded of her even more epic work The Narrow Road to the Deep North, setting Bashō, the 40 minutes of which i experienced in 2019 left me eager for more. Yet that work spoke very differently from this. i have no doubt Tulve was seeking to tap into some kind of pseudo-spiritual mindset in the nature of the text’s delivery, but in this respect it absolutely failed.
The one highlight of the concert – and it was a bright one – came in the short opening work from Riho Esko Maimets. In recent years, Maimets has been quite explicit in his programme notes about a significant change in his outlook and attitude, influenced, among other things, by the state of the world. The effect this has had on his work seems to have lifted him out of a crowd-pleasing, conservative rut into a place of considerably more impressive compositional freedom. In Sest tahan appi hüüda [For I wish to Cry for Help] he set up a texture of overlapping gestures, all within the range of a minor third: rising, falling, repeating, oscillating, sliding. From this constrained origin, the interval widened while the behaviour continued, in the process sounding more and more forceful, turning violent, becoming a huge wall of cries, pitch still present but by now irrelevant, the raw unleashing all that mattered. Its closing moments were no less potent, the voices falling back to a low hum, not remotely spent but red hot, continuing to quietly fume. In complete contrast to the rest of the concert – real and grounded, concerned neither with religious vacuity nor hand-wringing moralising – it was one of the most immediate, impactful choral works i’ve heard in recent times, personal, pungent and painful.
The most unconventional of the festival’s three choral concerts brought together the formidable force that is the Estonian National Male Choir and the Ensemble of the Estonian Electronic Music Society (EMA), for an evening of new and old, sometimes simultaneously.
No-one but no-one performs Veljo Tormis like the ENMC. Their rambunctious qualities – able to turn on a dime, switching instantly from drunken revellers to lyrical crooners to shamanistic madmen to bellicose pugilists – makes their renditions of Tormis’ more dramatic music unforgettable. That was even more the case on this occasion, joined as they were by the EMA, whose approach – not unlike like the Chapman Brothers’ treatment of Goya – was not to tread carefully around the choir but project themselves across it. That sounds almost anti-artistic, yet the results proved otherwise, the electronics playing into and ramping up the drama, supporting and embellishing Tormis’ astonishing vocal fireworks. This was nowhere better demonstrated than in the famous Litany to Thunder, where choir and electronics were perfectly aligned, parallel but complementary languages channelled into displays of raw power and immensity, utterly unrestrained, and truly thrilling.
Despite being at the opposite end of the energy spectrum, some of the other works in the concert, all premières, made an even deeper impression. Ülo Krigul, one of Estonia’s most unpredictable composers, reworked a piece of his from 2008, *.ram for male choir and electronics, to explore aspects of memory. Festooned with archive recordings on a variety of archaic formats – including a long loop of magnetic tape strewn across the entire length of the Estonia Concert Hall – the work was a mess of hauntological scraps and possibilities. For a time they teased the air, wisps of unresolvable substance, eventually coalescing into something semi-distinct, a hovering quasi-choir. The ENMC now entered, mingling with the sound of their historical selves, fragmenting into asynchronous sections, reassembling, defocusing, arriving at a new place of half-focused chordal clarity, gently blurred by the electronics. *.ram was a profoundly intimate piece, one that treated history, and memory, as a flawed but nonetheless special, even sacred, object – something hallowed, to be handled with care. Like a love song to the past in the language of the present.
Alisson Kruusmaa set a quietly passionate text from Tom-Olaf Urb asserting the necessity of fearless speech and song in her new work now we’re talking. Kruusmaa shaped this into a music where the choir walked between order and disorder, not quite slipping in and out of control as it was so organised, but a kind of movement in and out of clarity for gently dramatic effect. Its tone was nicely equivocal: what warmth it had was not relaxed, but more like the heat from a wound, and the rising chords near its end seemed subtly pained. Most striking of all, though, was Sun-flower by Georg Jakob Salumäe (who won last year’s Young Composer competition). His setting of Blake emerged from a delicious, low registral miasma, becoming lyrical but also dense and concentrated. As it continued, its apparent simplicity belied the way complex chords freely intermingled with what at first seemed familiar but turned out to be utterly individual (at times bringing to mind Thomas Adès’ Gefriolsae me). Its conclusion, pulling back to a low, fading oscillation, was exquisite. i said last year that i was already looking forward to what Salumäe would contribute to next year’s festival, and that’s again true; fingers crossed in 2027 he’ll be given the opportunity to fill an even larger canvas.
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 Philharmonic Chamber Choir & Cantoque Ensemble
Estonian National Male Choir & EMA: audio / video
