PRO CLASSICS, April 2008

Intellectual – or rather spiritual:

Modern sacred music from Estonia on Troubadisc

It is a pleasure for us to be able to recommend to reviewers some glowing music from the “land of the white nights”. There is an impressive number of composers from Estonia who have made a name for themselves both in their home country and on the international scene. The best-known is of course the self-exiled Arvo Pärt, though he is not necessarily the most typical. His potentially popular “Tintinnabuli system” would have been unthinkable without its Estonian roots, which makes him an essential ingredient of the new Troubadisc CD, recorded by the Orthodox Singers under Valery Petrov. Three movements from the Kanon Pokajanen (“Canon of Repentance”), composed ten years ago, bring to an end the captivating and many-layered programme sung by this small and select unaccompanied chamber choir from Tallinn, whose performances are imbued from first to last with a spirituality which allows the concept of new religious music to appear in a light that transcends all the demarcations between the various faiths.

This recording presents antiphons written by Andres Uibo in 2005 for the Orthodox Singers and two works, “At the Crossroads” (1991) and “Church Tower Bell in My Village” (1978), by the eminent choral composer Veljo Tormis.These pieces are symptomatic insofar as they articulate a certain self-awareness rising from deep cultural regions, sometimes combined with a spirit of protest which, far from courting pity, makes gestures that are proudly “dissident” and “national”. According (somewhat surprisingly) to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the sound of a church bell was, in those days of Soviet domination, an aural signal that was not at all to the taste of the men in power in the Kremlin.


MusicWeb, October 2008

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The Orthodox Singers here present a selection of a cappella music written by three contemporary Estonian composers of whom Pärt is obviously the best known internationally. Founded in 1989 by its conductor Valery Petrov this is a versatile group, attuned to widely differing stylistic calls from a large range of composers. Its primary focus however has always been early Orthodox chant and it’s natural that it has recently chosen to include contemporary Orthodox works as well. The usual suspects can be cited; Pärt, Tavener but also Valery Kalistratov. The ensemble consists of three sopranos, three altos, two tenors and three basses.

Andres Uibo’s Antiphones was written in 2005 for these forces. Uibo is an organist as well as a composer, and works in Tallinn, where he graduated in 1981. This is a work that has absorbed Old Church chant into its bloodstream and conjures up a subtle use of vocal groupings, pedal notes and opportunities for solo voices to penetrate the texture of the writing.

Though Pärt is the best known of the trio Veljo Tormis is the senior composer and At the Crossroads (1991) demonstrates yet again how masterful are his choral works. This is an excerpt from the epic poem The Three Journeys of Ilja Muromet. It exploits the powerful and sonorous basses of the Singers in a work that is, very much as was the Uibo, deeply saturated in antique sonorities. But striving and full-blooded it offers a powerful contrast with Uibo’s more quiescent work – here drama and flailing energy are the watchwords. Tower Bell in my Village is a much earlier Tormis work, completed in 1978. It uses old rural wedding songs and threnodies as well as bells and a reciter. Written at a time when Estonia was in thrall to the Soviet Union, and when that monolith was still engaged on a policy of cultural repression, Tower Bell in my Village evokes the values of cultural difference through the words of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – the reciter speaks the words in English by the way. It’s an important piece that builds incrementally to affirmative colour and choral shouts – exceptionally well performed all round.

Pärt’s contribution revolves around his 1996 work Canon of Repentance, from which we hear three movements. This uses an ancient Russian prayer book and its musical embodiment conforms to the sense of visionary simplicity that the composer so richly evokes. Given the stark text of Ode VI one finds that the music is consolatory in the extreme with a beautiful purity in the words of the Theotokion - “O Virgin Mother of God, protect me from evil visible and invisible.” The Prayer after the Canon is also eloquently expressive in Pärt’s finest and most artless way.

There are full texts and a pretty decent booklet. The performances are in every way worthy of the music.
Jonathan Woolf
 

To the rest of the west, Estonian choral music has been pretty much dominated by the name Arvo Pärt for the last decade and more. It doesn’t take much exploration to come up with some equally powerful composer however, though I had never come across Andres Uibo until now. An organist and conductor, Uibo is an energetic promoter of Estonian music abroad. His Antiphons were composed especially for the Orthodox Singers, and follows the tradition of performing psalms during the Orthodox liturgy. As such, the music gives us little by way of a ‘new sound’, especially when compared with Pärt’s own established treatment of this kind of music. The Antiphons are however effectively meditative and reflective, and have their own sense of timeless atmosphere.

Like Pärt, Veljo Tormis is another giant in the Estonian musical firmament, and his more distinctive style is immediately apparent from the start of At the Crossroads. The text is from a medieval epic Russian poem, the title of which alludes to the directions ancient character Ilya Muromets is given by a roadside stone - the choices of which seem to provide an intractable problem. The pulsing accompaniments and primal melodic shapes in the piece build slowly to a grand climax and a beautiful conclusion – the open intervals in the music refusing however to resolve into anything like a closed cadence. Tower Bell in my Village opens with; yes, you guessed it, the chimes of a bell. Sung in English, and with an English spoken text, there are some inflections and emphases which take a little getting used to, but the piece is actually quite a moving comment on the changes of modern times, a strange kind of surrealist nostalgia, and a dreamlike state of living. The sung voices provide a slowly changing but distinctive backdrop for the speaker over five parts, which create subtle changes in the colour and rhythmic variety in the voices. I can understand why the translation was used for this recording, but can sense that something essential is lost from the rhythms in both the speech of the speaker and those of the choir in this English version. The directness of Tormis’s musical language allied to his uncompromising message is however a strong clue to the popularity of his work in Estonia, as well as abroad.

Anyone recording Arvo Pärt these days has to climb the mountain of a catalogue which is inhabited by the likes of the Hilliard Ensemble with Tõnu Kaljuste, Stephen Layton’s Polyphony, and Paul Hillier’s recordings with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. The three Pärt pieces here come from his Kanon Pokajanen, the complete version of which is already well served by an ECM two-disc release with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under the noble direction of Tõnu Kaljuste. The Orthodox Singers do well enough, but I’m afraid that their singing of these pieces is a litmus test of their performances on the rest of the disc. I find their sound rather woolly and soft-edged, lacking in the real dynamic contrasts of colour which the best Estonian vocalists seem able to produce. The recording is good enough however, and agreed, much of the music is gentle and contemplative, but the choir on this disc doesn’t ‘grip’ me in the way so many others do. There are some moments of precarious intonation as well, especially at extremes of range, and the choir’s generally dolorous tones made me feel a bit depressed, if the truth be known.

The Orthodox Singers are to be applauded for giving us a few rarely heard pieces on this release, and I do appreciate their technical abilities in terms of creating a genuinely soft dynamic and an atmosphere of religious devotion. Estonian choral music goes way beyond Arvo Pärt, and Paul Hillier’s ‘Baltic Voices’ series is an excellent place to start such an exploration. This disc will most certainly not put you off, but it may not inspire you in quite the same way either.
Dominy Clements