This year the Baltic & Estonian Music Days adopted the theme Umwelt, meaning the unique sensory world of every organism. What it is that makes each living being’s experience of existence distinctive. Perhaps music can aid in obtaining some insight into other modes of experience? Or perhaps music firms up what is distinctive about human Umwelt, and how one cannot really think one’s way out of it.
On Sunday the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, led by British conductor Clement Power, presented a range of contemporary orchestral works, including three premieres. The orchestra can be a difficult tangle to extricate oneself from. As a listener I don’t think I obtained access to a different Umwelt – but was rather more firmly located in the one I’m already in.
Margo Kõlar’s opening piece, …just one word…, was a curious phenomenon. Completed in 1999, it didn’t sound a quarter of a century old so much as half a century old. Its quick changes of mood were also unusual in this concert, which broadly concerned itself with music of gradual, oceanic change.
Liisa Hõbepappel’s And now it is still now was one of the three premieres presented on this evening. Like Kõlar’s work, its materials seemed familiar. Beginning with detuned harp and microtonal drifting in the strings, we eventually arrive with the winds in a series of rapid filigree chromatic and octatonic scales, strongly reminiscent of Grisey and Haas, against Herrmann-esque dissonant string chords. The piece’s curious chamber-scale ending, which returned to detuned harp with solo viola and flute, made it hard to know why exactly things had been assembled in the way they had.
Cellist Valle-Rasmus Roots joined the orchestra for a new cello concerto by Age Veeroos, titled Harpyia. Referencing the harpies of Ancient Greek mythology, Veeroos writes that she means to capture feelings of the calm before the storm. The main motive of this work was a semitone alternation, presented at various speeds, in the orchestra and the solo cello. I wasn’t sure if this limited material was enough to carry the piece. Beginning with pizzicato cello solo, and ending with a cello cadenza, after various orchestral build-ups, transitions and transformations, the piece winds down on this halting semitone alternation. I don't know if it was all that convincing.
Linda Leimane’s Enantiomorphic Chambers, named for two symmetrical sculptures of Robert Smithson, also concerned itself with dissonant build-ups – on a grander scale. The mirrored symmetries of Smithson are represented via two crescendoing tam-tams, positioned at either side of the orchestra. The aim of Smithson’s sculpture was to use optical phenomena to cancel out the viewer’s reflection. Here, the orchestral texture builds to such loudness that analagously cancels out our ability to hear. But while gesturing at mid-century formalism of Xenakis, despite its loudness this music seemed to me more neo-romantic. A middle-section, with piano and bowed crotales, recalled the opening of Mahler 1.
Justina Repečkaitė’s Vellum was the most successful work on the programme. The music seemed confident and direct, something that can be difficult for many composers for whom orchestral pieces are relative rarities. The music felt straightforwardly au courant too. Constructed like other pieces in the programme from waves of dissonant harmonic pile-up, at the piece’s centre was a repeated, unrelenting section built around upward glissandos in horns and strings, sharp violent crescendi and noisy percussion. This section drives itself home, before a short, sinister conclusion, which ends almost as soon as it arrives. Arresting and contemporary.
Marius Baranauskas’ Supernova, the final piece on the programme, was also a premiere, and like Leimare’s work it also indulged at times in severe loudness. But it also operated with gentleness – perhaps more than the great cosmic explosion of the title would imply. The grand opening chords, for brass and winds, didn’t recall the blankness of space so much as a wide, open landscape. Colourful, extended tonalities processed in waves, oceanic, rolling. After its huge fortissimo climax, the piece abruptly transitions to gentle harmonic glissandi, before concluding with a brief cello solo. I found myself not so much hovering in space as observing it, firmly located on the Earth’s surface.
Lawrence’s trip to Tartu was funded by Baltic & Estonian Music Days.
