One of the few composers from Estonia to achieve significant international success and renown is Erkki-Sven Tüür. For much of his career, Tüür’s music has been typified, almost defined by, its ebullience and energy. In contrast to many of his compatriots, Tüür inclines toward states of driving momentum and accumulating pressure. Yet this has always found its match – indeed, its equal – in lyricism: smooth, light and often ethereal, a weightless counterpart to rude, unruly heft.
This duality of states finds a parallel, perhaps even a source, in Tüür’s own life. Born in 1959 on the western island of Hiiumaa (Estonia’s second largest island), he has remained there all his life, for the last 40 years living in a renovated farmhouse on the Kõpu peninsula. Known for its outstanding biodiversity and natural beauty – particularly the Kõpu Nature Reserve – this place forms the epicentre of Tüür’s compositional reflection and activity.
“It’s a very spectacular place,” Tüür says, “there are really deep woods, and a very beautiful and kind of wild seashore.” During the time of occupation, Tüür discovered the peninsula as an oasis of calm and solitude. “We always had to ask permission from the Soviet border guards to go to the seashore, it was a special border zone. All these seashores were empty, you were literally the only person walking for kilometres and kilometres through the most beautiful sandy beaches. It was like a paradise, and that’s why I loved this place – this was the reason I wanted to have something of my own in this place.”
In this respect, Tüür has continued a tradition established by previous generations of his family. His grandparents lived in Hiiumaa’s only town, Kärdla, where Tüür himself was born. “My mother’s roots are on the other island, on the south, Saaremaa, but my father’s roots are generations and generations on Hiiumaa.”
In his life as a composer, Tüür still finds the island serves as an invaluable locus of separation – both literally and figuratively – from the busyness (and business) of his career. “In the city, you live the most speedy life, you have to rush here and there. But on the island, you have a different pace, your thoughts are different. When I go over the water, during the ferry trip something changes. Every time when I come back from the mainland, I have the feeling that my inner clock is somehow rewinding, so that time is ticking in a different rhythm on the island.”
It is here that Tüür composes – and even in this already separated location, he has an additional layer of isolation. “I have a special building there, my studio, which is a couple of hundred metres away from the little old farmhouse. And I have to say that every walk from my farmhouse to the studio, at the other end of the plot, feeds my soul really. You know, in the darkness of a winter night, I stand and gaze at the starry sky or admire the moonlight, for instance, and sometimes the northern lights. And in the summer, the northern sky glows continuously, and deer walking across the meadow, I can see them from the windows of my studio. I’m fully in the middle of wild nature there, the environment gives me the energy to focus on my creative work.”
Yet despite his immersion in the natural landscape, Tüür’s work is not, and has never been, ‘nature music’. “You can certainly find analogies,” he points out, “between the various processes that occur in nature. For example, how I work with transformations in musical development, let’s say all these slow texture changes refer to organic life, how a plant grows or whatever, but it’s a deeper connection, not like I’m just all the time writing a Pastoral Symphony!”
Symphonies feature heavily in Tüür’s output, and to date he has composed no fewer than ten. It would be easy to assume that these are works of special significance, but not surprisingly, Tüür’s view is more nuanced. “It’s clear that my musical language, since I left my progressive rock band In Spe in 1983, has evolved significantly. The first Piano Sonata and first String Quartet marked the starting point most clearly – this was the beginning.”
In the years that followed, Tüür sought to introduce elements of central European modernism and US minimalism into his work, and he mentions works such as his First Cello Concerto, First Violin Concerto and Exodus – all composed in the late 1990s – as well as Architectonics VI (2004) as examples of this. “I want to bring up Symphony no. 4, ‘Magma’, because this marks a move toward a new and much more coherent approach, which I call ‘vectorial’. And then continued in works like Symphonies 5, 9 and 10. These works are also crucial.”
When I ask about his most recent compositions, among the most important to him are several concertos, the Flute Concerto ‘Lux Stellarum’ (2021), Cello Concerto no. 2 ‘Labyrinths of Life’ (2023) and Oboe Concerto ‘Desert Wind’ (2024). Tüür says these are key to him because they mark a new point of maturity. “I’m moving more freely with my vectorial method,” he explains. “I’m not worrying about it as I was while I was writing Oxymoron” – Tüür has previously cited this piece as the first of his ‘vectorial’ works – “I’m not calculating, all these numerical things are somehow subconscious, in the background. I feel that I’m much more intuitive and I trust my inner voice.”
This is not a purely theoretical observation: the musical shift is tangible. For example, in his Violin Concerto no. 2 ‘Angel’s Share’, composed in 2018, the music demonstrates the duality I described at the start, typical of a great deal of Tüür’s music. The work oscillates between poles of behaviour – fast, rhythmic momentum or slower, reflective lyricism – creating a tense, tilting balance of contrasting instincts. Whereas the more recent Oboe Concerto is much more mercurial and spontaneous, its fabric subject to an unpredictable stretching and flexing that directly impacts on both the nature and attitude of the musical material. There has been a distinct evolution in Tüür’s compositional thinking.
“I feel much better nowadays with this sort of approach,” he says, “I’m only writing the music which I feel a need for, which is absent, which I can’t get somewhere else.” He describes a shift in the role of his ‘vectorial’ techniques. “If one has polished the technique, the tools and all these theories, this knowledge is worthless without the most important thing, which is intuition, the magic, you know? You have to dig yourself through the mechanical approach, all these techniques and calculations and theories, and get free of them at the end of the day.”
I mention to him my own perception, that intuition is one of the defining characteristics of much contemporary compositional thought in Estonia, and Tüür agrees, going on to explain how he sees his own return to intuition now as a journey coming full circle. “To be honest, you touched on the very essence of the thing I discovered during the mid ’80s, that Estonian music was nothing but intuition! I wanted to get rid of it, I started to combine all these combinations of serial and post-minimal systems. And now I think I have returned to this point where I value intuition again, but on another level, because I now have things I didn’t have then.”
The fact that Tüür regards concertos as among his most significant recent works perhaps in part derives from the sheer number of them. In the last decade alone he has composed seven, and his latest composition is yet another, on this occasion for the saxophone. I ask if concertos especially appeal to him, and his answer is as much practical as artistic. “I think there’s more use to concertos, because there are always more opportunities for commissioning this sort of stuff.” He points out that the concertos receive many more performances than his symphonies, partly because of the enthusiasm of soloists.
It’s also clear that the presence of a solo instrument has a marked effect on Tüür’s compositional thinking. He alludes to their “always changing relationship” with the orchestra, and that the concerto is effectively seen “through the eyes of someone who observes the world very closely. And then you have to paint the surroundings and the world where the individual has to move and develop, and the different situations they come across, with challenges.”
The latest intrepid soloist to face Tüür’s challenges is Asya Fateyeva, who will be giving the first performances of the Saxophone Concerto in Kiel at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in July and Stockholm at the Baltic Sea Festival in August, with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Tüür avoids revealing any of the work’s secrets, apart from the fact that it’s designed as a single span with four distinct sections. Many of his compositions have subtitles to fuel the audience’s imagination, but not this time. “I had some hard-working sessions to find the right title, and I didn’t find one. I thought, ‘My god, I have used them all!’ So now it’s just Saxophone Concerto.”
Asya Fateyeva performs Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Saxophone Concerto at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival on 17th July and the Baltic Sea Festival on 29th August.
See upcoming performances of Erkki-Sven Tüür.
See a playlist of Erkki-Sven Tüür’s 10 Symphonies.
This article was sponsored by the Estonian Business and Innovation Agency.
