The Estonians

Oct 11 05:32 UTC 1997

On Thursday night, Leslie & I attended the concert by the Estonian 
Philharmonic Chamber Choir, at Hill Auditorium.  We had thought about 
blowing off the concert, due to just being worn out from Leslie's school 
schedule, but we went anyway; it turned out to be the most engaging 
classical concert I'd been to in a long time.  
 
The Chamber Choir was accompanied by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, 
also from Estonia.  The first half of the concert was a liturgical 
piece by Mozart; gorgeous textures, and I made a resolution that I 
must get out to hear more Mozart concerts.
 
After intermission came two compositions by expatriate Estonian 
Avro Part.  TRISAGION was played by the orchestra only; shimmering
sounds, perhaps vaguely reminiscent of Philip Glass.  The Chamber 
Choir came back for Part's LITANY, a cycle of 24 prayers, one per hour,
arranged with four vocal soloists.   
 
It struck me that Part seems to have solved the problem of how to 
make a broad audience interested in contemporary serious music.
 
On Saturday, the Chamber Choir will be performing an acapella program 
at St. Thomas' Catholic Church; according to the promotional material, 
this is a program put together for Ann Arbor alone.  The second 
half of the concert is to be works by Estonian composer Veljo Tormis.
Coincidentally, I had just read a little puff piece about Tormis 
earlier in the week.  Tormis' work draws heavily on folk song themes, 
and as Estonian is kin to Finnish and Sami, I was getting quite excited
about this.  So today I ran around Ann Arbor and cleaned the town out 
of Tormis recordings.
 
(more to come...)

response 2 of 12:

Oct 11 13:11 UTC 1997

Is this the same thing that's happening this evening?  If so, teflon and I
will be going...

response 4 of 12:

Oct 11 20:37 UTC 1997

Orange, shoulder-length hair.  You'll notice me, all right.

response 6 of 12:

Nov 6 00:31 UTC 1997

Time to get your battery pack repaired, tef.

response 8 of 12:

Nov 8 04:24 UTC 1997

"A policeman's lot is not a nappy one."

response 10 of 12:

Nov 10 02:20 UTC 1997

No.  What on Earth are you blathering about?  I was just quoting from 
"Pirates of Pinzanse?".

response 12 of 12:

Nov 4 07:23 UTC 2001

I recently heard an interesting recording by members of the Estonian 
Philharmonic Chamber Choir: "How Can I Recognize My Home?" by the 
Estonian composer Veljo Tormis.  Two sopranos, singing antiphonally, 
with exceedingly spare piano accompaniment, sing the same simple two-
bar phrase over and over for five minutes.  (The words are in Estonian, 
of course.)  The description makes it sound tedious, but it's riveting -
 and that, by me, is pretty much the definition of minimalism.

It's on a choral album of his called "Litany to Thunder", which I 
didn't buy because I wasn't as immediately impressed with the other 
works on it.  (I was trying to listen to all this at a Tower listening 
station while duets between Ella "whoops, I lost the tune" Fitzgerald 
and Louis "let's sing like a frog" Armstrong blared over the sound 
system.)  "How Can I Recognize My Home?" sounded a lot like Aulis 
Sallinen's vocal music, except for being far more minimalist than 
anything Sallinen would do; but otherwise - as one might guess from the 
album title - Tormis seems to have been taking lessons from Jon Leifs, 
who is not exactly my favorite Scandinavian composer.