Chamber music didn’t just feature prominently at this year’s Estonian Music Days, it provided several of the festival’s most striking performances, including some of the most remarkable music i’ve heard in the 10 years i’ve been attending.
Not so much in the concert given by Ireland’s Quiet Music Ensemble, which ranks as one of the weirdest performances i can remember. In theory, they performed works by four composers, Liisa Hõbepappel and Märt-Matis Lill from Estonia, Karen Power and Anna Murray from Ireland. Yet in practice, for the most part it seemed as if they were not playing music by any composer in particular but rather doing their own thing, a process that required them to not so much play their instruments as fidget, fumble and frot them. As with all such performances, its initial intrigue – mysterious in Hõbepappel’s Studies on the theme of something delicate; gossamer and filigree in parts 10 and 2 of Power’s Human Nature series – was soon revealed to be self-similar and repetitive, variations on a limited behaviour rather than a theme. By the time they reached the final piece, Murray’s my little Force explodes, the emperor was revealed to be very naked indeed.
The one exception was Lill’s 3 Songs of Doggerland. Here, finally, was something different and individual. We were once again in Lill’s familiarly dark soundworld, where soft air sounds filled the space and a low bass melody spoke like a forlorn, forgotten foghorn resonating across a sea of ghosts. Finding companions, the ensemble sang together; it was gorgeous. Beyond this the music broke up, breath and key noise replacing anything concrete, melodic traces emerging as slow, dazed echoes, buzzing gently. The final song suggested strength, imaginary timpani seeming to herald something majestic and imposing – yet it evaporated, vocalise materialising as further fragmentary traces of line, itself dissolving over bass exhalations. Stunning.
The festival once again included the final concert of the Young Composer competition. On this occasion the ensemble comprised flute, accordion and double bass, and while the quality was very wide indeed, the best works suggested a number of composers to pay attention to in years to come. Among them was Frida Hansen, whose Võitlus saksa keele õpetajaga [the struggle with the German teacher] was playful yet stodgy, like trying to do a dance in quick-drying cement, causing the trio’s dogged energy to seem rather grotesque. In süda, suu, liiv, hambad [heart, mouth, sand, teeth], August Lippus established a mix of temperature and temperament: hot-cold, assertive-gentle, clustered-melodic. Yet the trio wasn’t in any way dysfunctional, Lippus finding ways to make them pull and work together, the only drawback being the piece was overlong for its ideas. Ats Themas‘ Segadus kolmes osas [confusion in three parts] was appropriately like a puzzle being worked through, quietly and steadily, all three players engrossed in the task. Its central section appeared to be trying to force a solution, staccatos and dark chords yielding to edgy accents and chaotic clusters, while the concluding part suggested confusion had prevailed, pulling back to an odd melodic place, the puzzle remaining unsolved.
Best of all – and, happily, the competition jury and players agreed, awarding it both first prize and the ensemble prize – was Branches by Aleksei Kuzovkin. It occupied the most curious state, seemingly tense and relaxed at the same time. The players moved carefully, their material weighty, as if something deeper and darker had led to this. What resulted was a lovely elusive harmonic language, at once immediate but strange, having an askew quality that made it seem pained. Prolonged silence at the end, following a quiet conclusion, gave the impression of music somehow present despite its absence.
One additional event, not part of the Estonian Music Days but fortunately nestling in between its concerts, was a short recital by pianist Tähe-Lee Liiv, titled ‘Only 21st Century’ (this was followed by another, ‘Only 20th Century’, that i couldn’t attend). Liiv gave a strong performance at the end of last year’s AFEKT festival, and she arguably gave an even stronger one on this occasion. She began, as she had then, with Magnus Lindberg‘s two Etudes, this time emphasising No. 1’s gorgeous impressionistic soundworld, its swirling material always directed, focused, never ephemeral or mere embellishment. Filigree substance. Liiv’s playing was beautiful, skirting post-Impressionistic and -Romantic evocations without yielding to them. No. 2 occupied the same soundworld, now more dramatic and varied, fixated more by gestural moments – but, again, captivated by tumbling floridity.
The two premières that followed went in different directions, each teasing out aspects of Liiv’s excellent technique. Alireza Farajianhamedani‘s Indolent Boredom of the Heaviest Lightness was like a leaden chorale, deep, constricted – or perhaps compressed – only to jump, now suddenly higher and lighter. It continued in this polarised vein, moving at extremes of register with a cautious, steady pace. There was something weird and distant about it, yet its beauty was immediate.
Liisa Hõbepappel‘s “LOG” had the geometric attitude and trajectory of a Ligeti étude. Like a Shepard tone from the inside, circling and spiralling – up or down or neither – feeling weightless, playful, whimsical. Seeming to then either become a quicker version of the same or a more elaborate version at the same tempo, it moved to a lower register and became more impassioned, pushing so hard that pitches were almost entirely blurred. Yet the familiar pattern continued within, clarified now as rising, ending up as delicate high tracery, still circling, never quite changing, never quite the same, seemingly wanting to continue up there forever more.
For me, the most unforgettable concert at this year’s Estonian Music Days was given by the M4GNET String Quartet. Jüri Reinvere’s Nachtbild mit Wetterleuchten was, unsurprisingly, by far the most conventional work on the programme (aside from the encore, a bizarrely incongruous bit of dreck from Pärt Uusberg). A fairly rudimentary nocturne, high tremolandi were the icy backdrop from which each of the players took turns to emerge with solos. Group energy was established, rising scales running through it, but the cold opening made its presence felt such that the music seemed irresistibly inclined, via ruminating and faltering, to return to its chill. Somewhat more adventurous was Feathered Mirrors by Madli Marje Gildemann, where gestures, some fleeting, others lingering, were all cast with an abstract demeanour. Sounding like archetypes, they were nonetheless capable of an almost animalistic intensity, their behavioural traits like parameters subject to continual fluctuation. As in Gildemann’s Three Studies on Plant Biology, an uncanny sense of organic life underpinned the music.
Anna-Margret Noorhani and Gregor Kulla both took a more radical approach to sound. Noorhani’s Three Pieces for String Quartet began from a place of powerful grinding, yet it also glistened, with high filigree indicating this was a whole lot more than mere brute force. Yet there was something elemental about its starting point, nascent, unsophisticated – appropriate to the movement’s subtitle ‘Raw Materials’. From here, the work abruptly slowed, with sustained falling and wavering high tones alongside smaller things: steady cello repetitions, a viola solo, brief glissandos and Bartok pizzicatos. The conclusion went to extremes, one moment grinding again, the next ethereal, now poised and tense, now animated and energised, finally surging into a noise wall. Kulla’s Whatevergirl demonstrated complex contours of movement, alien, unresolvable, implacable, unassailable. It was like a whole new grammar of music, taking nothing for granted. Yet not a grammar that sought to redefine existing fundamentals – melody, harmony, rhythm – but effectively (r)ejected them, in real time forging a continuity and narrative from white-hot conceptions of sonic matter, sculpted into a remarkable, compelling compositional entity.
Vestige was the title of Tatjana Kozlova-Johannes’ new work, and it caused the entire world to stop. A high note, persistent, tinnitus-like, was an unnerving presence above. Below: chords, practice muted, strange, ambiguous, foreign, wraith-like, ancient, modern. Like echoes from an old accordion, a consort of viols, askew analogue electronics – they were utterly arresting. Rhythmic chugs were sporadic, notes shifted and adjusted by minuscule degrees, and by now the polarisation – of register, clarity, continuity – was complete. And it was devastating: so mysterious, so remote, so desolate – yet so immediate, and so moving. This was reinforced through the work’s duration, testifying to the desire, the need, to linger with these ruins of sound, to sit within them, take comfort from them, to commemorate what they once were and mourn what they now are. Not hauntology but history, the past tense as music. The chords found momentum, a slow, regular, weak forward motion, but they went nowhere, from the void, to the void, all the while continuing to resist efforts to make sense or resolve their nature. What comfort they offered came in part from simply being non-silent; an abstract presence with all signs of familiarity bleached away, gaunt, skeletal, wasted. Kozlova-Johannes has a tendency to surprise, to go deeper and further than most other composers, and here she tapped into an entirely new level of mesmeric darkness, staring into black, into pain, into infinity, with absolutely no fear. It was absolutely shattering.
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:
Quiet Music Ensemble: video
Young Composer competition: audio / video
M4GNET Quartet: audio / video
