Tucked away between Russia and the Baltic Sea, Estonia (population 1.3 million) has long punched above its musical weight. Veljo Tormis, Ester Mägi and Erkki-Sven Tüür are just the tip of the iceberg, while Arvo Pärt, 90 this year and the subject of this celebratory concert, regularly tops lists of the world’s most popular composers. Who better, then, to present his work than two of the country’s finest ensembles: the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.
Tõnu Kaljuste, who founded both, led authoritative performances, opening with an unusually impassioned account of the austerely meditative Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. String players leant into hypnotic musical lines urged on by the conductor’s’s fluttering left hand. Fratres received similarly insistent treatment, Harry Traksmann’s solo violin performing death-defying variations over orchestral iterations of the work’s modal melody. Mägi’s defiantly tonal Vesper tapped into a similar vein of hopeful simplicity.
Two substantial works demonstrated the choir’s preeminence in this music. Written in 2009, Adam’s Lament explores the father of humanity’s anguish following the expulsion from paradise. The music seems to hang its head one moment before bursting out in wodges of adjacent harmonies the next. Basses and tenors were especially powerful in a confident and disciplined reading.
The masterly Te Deum was composed in 1984 for three choirs, strings, prepared piano and wind harp (here represented by an electronic wash). Some of its reverberatory resonance was lost in the dry acoustic, the piano sounded tame, and the choirs could have been better separated for spatial effects. Nevertheless, committed singing ensured the sinuous medieval lines and pungent harmonies worked their magic.
The London premiere of L’abbé Agathon, a haunting tale of a hermit put to the test by a leper who turns out to be an angel, was a chance to hear a different side of a composer rarely credited as a musical dramatist. Trudging strings conjured a desert trek and pizzicatos a bustling market, with biting dissonances accompanying the needy outcast. Maria Listra held the audience spellbound throughout, her ethereal soprano spiralling higher and higher as the divine messenger disappeared into the heavens.
