Bizet raises the roof at the Pärnu Music Festival

Ester Mägi died in 2021 at the age of 99, ‘the first lady’ of Estonian music, and so it seemed fitting that the Estonian Festival Orchestra should set the scene for their appearances at this year’s Pärnu Music Festival with Vesper, her string-orchestra hymn from the 1990s. The radiance of Mägi’s harmony draws on a Sibelian heritage in this medium. If a modal cadence here and there reminded this innocent ear of Arvo Pärt, perhaps that’s a sign of a shared Estonian identity.

All the same, as the composer Jüri Reinvere remarked in a press conference held to launch the EFO’s new album of his music (including On the Ship of Fools, premiered at last year’s festival), it is outsiders who tend to invent ‘Estonian’ musical fingerprints. For native composers (whether living at home or abroad, as Reinvere does, in Germany) ‘being Estonian’ is more an unconscious expression of a culture defined against its Baltic and Russian neighbours, and stretching back centuries before Mägi took lessons from the grandfather of the Estonian classical tradition, Heino Eller.

Among the most prominent of her contemporary successors is Tõnu Kõrvits. Given the best possible start in life by the charismatic performance of Ksenija Sidorova, his new Concerto for Accordion and Orchestra is a dance suite culminating in a grand sarabande. Kõrvits blends soloist and orchestra so that the entire ensemble sometimes breathes and sustains a phrase before its slow expiry, like a supersized accordion. Melodically anodyne to my ears, the concerto nonetheless gathers a majestic momentum through the course of the sarabande, but Sidorova felt like the hero of the hour with her keening and dazzling solos. She then leaned into the affecting simplicity of an exquisite little accompanied song without words by Pēteris Vasks, The Fruit of Silence.

It was only with the second half, and a pulsating account of Bizet’s Roma, that the members of the EFO really spread their wings. Experienced live in the vibrant acoustic of the Pärnu Concert Hall, they fully deserve all the exalted comparisons with older ‘super-orchestras’ from Budapest and Lucerne. Roma was an intriguing choice to show off their undoubted qualities: a four-movement symphonic suite never played complete in the composer’s lifetime and still a rarity in concert, even compared with Bizet’s Symphony in C, apparently just waiting for a conductor to believe in it – as Paavo Järvi evidently does.

He gave it the full Thomas Beecham, amping up all its Mendelssohnian brilliance and proto-Straussian swagger. Järvi builds space in time for wind soloists to express themselves; whether Estonian locals or imports from the conductor’s ensembles in Bremen, Zürich and elsewhere, everyone has chosen to play with and for him, and it showed, in the almost indecent glow of the opening horn chorale and the electrifying response from the strings to the Neapolitan party mood of the finale.

If they don’t record Roma and the Symphony in C for their next Alpha album, the EFO are missing a trick, and the rest of us would be missing out, as Järvi underlined with the Prelude to Carmen. There was still time for a final encore, and a touching tribute to his father Neeme, sitting in the audience: the second of Two Swedish Folk Melodies by Johan Svendsen, which set the seal on the evening by returning us to the sunset reflection of Mägi’s Vesper. Meanwhile Pärnu partied on under a northern summer sun that hardly sleeps.

Peter's press trip was funded by the Pärnu Music Festival.