Last year, a capacity crowd at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall gave a rock-star reception to a concert of contemporary choral music. On Monday night, that same chorus will be back in Washington with a similar repertory \u2014 and you can still get tickets to the show.<\/p>\n
The chorus \u2014 the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir \u2014 is hardly a household name in this country. In Estonia, though, it\u2019s a national treasure, and its founder and frequent conductor, Tonu Kaljuste, has not only the looks of a rock star but also some of the same recognition and mystique.<\/p>\n
Widely acclaimed in the international choral world, Kaljuste picks and chooses his projects throughout the year, and every summer he returns to his base on an unspoiled island off the coast of Tallinn, Estonia\u2019s capital city. There, the annual Nargen Festival, which Kaljuste founded in 2009, offers performance art, opera and concerts in an old barn, with a special focus on the work of Cyrillus Kreek and Veljo Tormis, whom you probably haven\u2019t heard of, and Arvo P\u00e4rt, whom you probably have.<\/p>\n
It was a concert of P\u00e4rt\u2019s music that drew the crowds to the Kennedy Center last year \u2014 and the gales of applause when it was over. P\u00e4rt enjoys something of a cult following even outside his native Estonia. Pure, powerful and unabashedly spiritual, his work pulverizes boundaries between pop and classical to find wide appeal among sophisticated music lovers of all tastes.<\/p>\n
And its leading proponent is the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.
\n[How Arvo Part developed into a veritable priest of music, through Soviet repression and 12 years of silence.]<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe that there are two types of singers,\u201d Kaljuste has said, \u201cthose whose voices are their own instrument and know how to play them [and] those whose voices are an instrument but need someone else to play them. I prefer the first type of singer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Few choruses have such an intimate connection with their conductor and with the music they perform.<\/p>\n
Kaljuste and his choir literally grew up together. The chorus has its roots in a children\u2019s choir founded in 1951 by Kaljuste\u2019s father and teacher, Heino Kaljuste. It was named Ellerhein, for an Estonian wildflower. Tonu sang in the choir as a child and watched as it gave rise, in the mid-1960s, to an offshoot: an amateur adult chorus largely made up of former choir members who had outgrown the children\u2019s group but still wanted to sing.
\nBy the 1970s, Tonu Kaljuste had taken over the adult choir, testing his wings as a conductor (by then bolstered by years of study) with a range of innovative, experimental programs of everything from baroque music to folk-influenced, text-based works by Tormis. In 1980, the chorus and Kaljuste took top prizes at the Bela Bartok choir competition in Hungary, a coup that allowed Kaljuste to transform Ellerhein into a professional ensemble with the more official-sounding name of Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. That\u2019s still the group\u2019s official name, but some Estonians refer to it simply as \u201cKaljuste\u2019s choir.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arvo P\u00e4rt, of course, will be a main draw for Monday\u2019s concert at the National City Christian Church in Washington. The Estonian chorus could hardly perform here without featuring the composer, who has become \u2014 not least thanks to a series of recordings on the ECM label over the years \u2014 something of a hallmark for the choir. But the concert will focus on three composers\u2019 birthdays being observed this year: P\u00e4rt\u2019s 80th, Jean Sibelius\u2019s 150th and the 85th of Tormis, whose work became especially popular in Estonia as Soviet rule began to crumble in the late 1980s.<\/p>\n
Folk-based, in Tormis\u2019s case, doesn\u2019t mean easy. \u201cThe Curse Upon Iron,\u201d says concert presenter Neeta Helms, referring to the iconic Tormis work that will close the D.C. concert, \u201cis not something that everyone can pull off.\u201d
\nHelms is the founder and president of Classical Movements, a travel agency-cum-concert- presenter that has been hosting international choruses in Washington the past few years, often but not exclusively within the rubric of her new D.C.-area summer festival, Serenade. When Helms heard that the Estonian choir would be performing this year in Salt Lake City and in Colorado, Helms invited the group to Washington.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur whole goal,\u201d she says, \u201cis that we want people to do the music that they\u2019re good at that many people don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
[Classical Movements: Alexandria firm moves the music around the world.]
\nHelms\u2019s presenting series is rare in the music world in that it is part of a for-profit entity. \u201cCommercially, this is not a smart move,\u201d she says, \u201cbut artistically it\u2019s exactly what we want to do. I don\u2019t know if it will ever be financially viable as a series. Everybody else has sponsors; we don\u2019t ask anybody for money, ever. We either make it happen or we don\u2019t. But I\u2019m very pleased with how it\u2019s going, regardless.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the chorus, the American tour is merely a prelude to its biggest project of 2015.<\/p>\n
In May in Tallinn, P\u00e4rt and American playright and director Robert Wilson will present the premiere of a collaborative theatrical piece based on some of P\u00e4rt\u2019s best-known recent works, including \u201cAdam\u2019s Lament\u201d and \u201cTabula Rasa,\u201d as well as some new music he wrote for the occasion.<\/p>\n
The union of Wilson\u2019s static, ecstatic brand of light and movement with P\u00e4rt\u2019s distinctive, luminous music will be sealed through performances by the ensemble that has made P\u00e4rt\u2019s work its own: the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Kaljuste. Anyone who has heard the group perform is unlikely to forget its name.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/goingoutguide\/music\/estonian-choir-inspires-rock-star-reactions\/2015\/02\/26\/df8d1af4-b858-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html<\/p>\n
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