Estonia
joe.muggs
Tallinn is a very civilised city. It’s enough to provoke intense jealousy on arrival from the land of potholes, two year waiting lists and seven pound pints to find that not only do they have pretty much all the infrastructure of their Nordic neighbours, but you can get a beer for €5 to boot. And that’s before you get to the gig venues – a whole district of them, purpose built into office and warehouse spaces, all with huge cloakrooms where everyone politely and neatly hangs their winter coats and scarves, well-staffed bars and fantastically maintained sound gear. Just how efficient the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If Mélusine is encountered without knowing its background or themes it would still be remarkable. There is no need to know anything about what frames this journey through Chanson Française, electronica, jazz and show-tune sensibilities with lyrics in English, French, Haitian Kreyòl and Occitan. For all these aspects, Cécile McLorin Salvant’s seventh album is striking enough.Then, there’s the story told by the album: the tale of marriage, motherhood and an ensuing darkness experienced by a particular mélusine – European folklore’s mythical creature that’s half woman and half fish or serpent. Read more ...
David Nice
Circumstances matter here. The annual visit to what remains my favourite music festival in the world was going to be kyboshed by the date fixed for a big hospital operation. But the Pärnu Music Festival worked overtime to get me rebooked to the first slice of the 10 days, while my Macmillan nurse fixed up five crucial meetings and tests on the two days before my new departure date. I went, came back the evening before the 12-hour op and still can’t believe it all happened.That also shifted my usual expectations: I like to go for the big chamber concert featuring the world-class musicians of Read more ...
David Nice
Until last night, I’d only heard the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (ERSO at home, “Riiklik” standing for “National”) live in unfamiliar contemporary epics, with Kristiina Poska and Anu Tali respectively conducting Lepo Sumera’s Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, and Olari Elts just before his 2020 appointment as Music Director championing an Erkki-Sven Tüür triptych. This was a test of how they'd fare in more familiar repertoire. They passed with flying colours.Arvo Pärt's Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten was the first work by the Estonian master I ever heard in concert, when a then Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
One of the singers smashes out a jittery pulse on a shaman drum and the 50-strong choir intone a chant, while at the front a tenor who looks like a doorman you wouldn’t mess with spits out what sounds like a threat from between gritted teeth. It is the Estonian National Male Voice Choir performing Veljo Tormis’s Raua needmine (“Curse Upon Iron”) and it is utterly entrancing, invigorating – and just a little bit scary.The Estonian Tormis (1930-2017) wrote almost exclusively for voice, usually engaging in some way with Estonian folk traditions. But if this suggests bucolic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Estonia’s Mart Avi styles himself as “the twilight samurai of alternative pop”. He creates “nowhere-somewhere music, mapping uncharted territories between avant-pop and timeless grandeur”. The characterisations are issued via AVICORP, his internet presence.The in-person Mart Avi has an arresting charisma; a star quality making it impossible not to be drawn in by his 40-minute performance at Tallinn Music Week. The look could be enough – cutting a David Bowie and Brett Anderson dash. Despite what he says about its nebulousness, his music is a moody electropop with shades of The Associates, Read more ...
David Nice
When the first volume of Estonian master Jaan Kross’s peerless historical trilogy first appeared in an English translation by Merike Lepasaar Beecher back in 2016, what leapt out at me about this fictionalised saga about the adventures of real-life chronicler Balthasar Russow was how much it had in common with the Thomas Cromwell of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.Like Cromwell, Russow came from humble stock – though whether the peasantry into which he was born was Estonian-speaking, as Kross assumes, is open to question – and rose to mingle with aristocracy and royalty, a thorn in the side of many Read more ...
David Nice
When I first came to Estonia with a then still-exiled Neeme Järvi and his Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in 1989, the world-class young musicians who dazzled at this year’s Pärnu Music Festival hadn’t been born.A new Estonian musical golden age is now reaping the benefits of a superlative musical education system, but experience also counts: the central force that makes this festival the most welcoming I’ve ever experienced, Paavo Järvi, will be 60 this year; father Neeme, back in Estonia’s lovely summer capital by the Baltic after two years’ enforced absence, and brother Kristjan marked their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The gentleman in the centre of the picture above is Ivan Dorn. In Ukraine, he’s a pop star. A big pop star. His music, as he puts it on stage during the show opening Tallinn-Narva Music Week, is “pure Ukrainian house music.” Yep, there’s the bing-bong piano lines and cowbell beats of the pop end of house.Before 24 February this year an Ivan Dorn live appearance would of course be fun, an uplifting experience with a jumping-up-and-down audience doing lots of arm waving. This is confirmed in Tallinn where his enviable charisma is tempered by a charming awkwardness telegraphing he’s not fully Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The history of Estonia has been described as “a story set to song”. The Estonian activist Heinz Valk called singing “our nation’s most glorious form of self-expression.” There are, of course, other nations where singing is seen as an expression of national identity, but probably none more so than the Baltic country.The fully professional Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, founded in 1981, is one of the great choirs of the world. In Kings Place Hall One, directed by their genial founder Tõnu Kaljuste, they could use the wonderfully lively acoustic to allow their unique European-yet-Slavonic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hinged ends with “Moment,” a vaporous mood piece where a reflective voice lightly floats over and weaves between two, three-note keyboard arpeggios, occasional Gamelan-style percussive interjections and odd bubbling sounds. “Moment of clarity” are the final words.Earlier, “A Feast” is rhythmically more unyielding but the directness is offset by a vocal where phrases phase in and out as if being subjected to Doppler effect. Again though, a sense of otherness suggests that what appears to be electronic music is rooted in the organic: an apartness placing what’s heard between two worlds. The Read more ...
David Nice
“At the Pärnu Music Festival 2020” were words I never expected to type. A fortnight ago Estonia finally upped its non-quarantinable country rate from 15 to 16 infections in every 100,000 people (the UK was then on 15.9; our unfathomable Foreign Office has not, to my knowledge, returned the compliment, despite Estonian rates being next to 0 for weeks). That meant two key players of the Estonian Festival Orchestra, clarinettist Matthew Hunt and horn-player Alec Frank-Gemmill, as well as myself could travel. If a first visit in 2015 was cause for wonderment at how the restless Soviet state of 26 Read more ...