Estonia is a young nation, but it has influential neighbours. One theme at this year’s Estonian Music Days festival was the relationship between the contemporary music scenes in Estonia and Poland. The Warsaw Autumn Festival changed the musical landscape in Poland from the 1950s onwards, but its effects were also felt further afield. In the Soviet era, some Estonian composers were permitted to attend the festival, one of the very few opportunities for foreign travel, and an important window on musical developments abroad. This evening’s concert brought the story up to date, demonstrating continued links between the two countries. The young Polish group Ansambel Sepia presented a two-part programme, the first part dedicated to new music from Estonia, the second to works from Poland. Many connections were evident, but so too were the distinct identities of the two musical cultures.
Ansambel Sepia is based in Poznań and is made up of students and recent graduates of the city’s music academy. Their standards are high, but the sheer enthusiasm of the group is just as important to the success of the project. The ensemble tours widely, divising programmes that link contemporary Polish music with that of other nations. This evenings programme, named “Zooming Estonia” follows a similar events focussing on Ireland, Luxembourg and Korea. The group also performed an Estonian-themed even in Poland last year, with only one work overlapping with the programme of this Tallinn event.
The five Estonian works in the first half date from 2007 to 2015, all for chamber ensemble, various combinations of strings, woodwind, piano, trombone and percussion. There was only one première here, Aither by Age Veeroos, but that proved a highlight. Most of this piece is made up of breathy, unpitched sounds, breathing into the trombone, a sheet of paper brushed across the strings of the piano. But from this background definite pitches gradually emerge, as if reluctant to come into the foreground. The whole process is very gentle, and teasingly ambiguous, but describes a clear arc, with the notes eventually receding into the unpitched sounds and the work ending with gentle brush of a bowed cymbal.
Thule Variations, by Tõnu Kõrvits, stood out in this programme, as did his silent songs in the previous day’s orchestral concert, for his overt use of folk music elements and his post-minimalist language. Estonian new music tends to be expansive and gradual, but it rarely has specific links with repetition-based minimalism, and tonal allusions are rare. But Kõrvits is the exception, as this work for string quartet demonstrated. Yet there is nothing neoclassical about this music. Short melodic fragments appear, each with a specific modal identity, but are refracted through heterophonic textures and rhythmic patterns in the four instruments that are never quite in agreement. Despite its general consonance, the resulting music is curiously unsettling, always unstable but for reasons that remain unclear.