\u201cBut it doesn\u2019t mean anything!\u201d complains little Gretel in \u201cThe Sound of Music,\u201d faced for the first time with the seven notes (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si\/ti, do) of the tonal scale. And her governess, Maria, explains that you simply add words, \u201cone word for every note.\u201d The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, however, opened its concert Monday with a simple iteration of those seven notes, over and over, that wallowed in the pregnant potential of ambiguity, a foreshadowing and preparation of music-making to come, without any words at all.<\/p>\n
The chorus stood around the nave of the National City Christian Church, surrounding the audience, and following the clear hand gestures of their director, the charismatic, gray-maned Tonu Kaljuste. \u201cDo,\u201d came from the women at the front of the church, \u201cre\u201d from the men at the back of it, and each section continued to chime in, at different volumes and in different octaves, each note overlapping with the note next to it, and sometimes with two or three at once, to create a small halo of dissonance, while the music continued up and up and up in an unbroken spiral of notes until it was finally silenced, on \u201cdo,\u201d by the closing of Kaljuste\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n
The piece was called \u201cSolfeggio,\u201d it was written by Arvo Part, and it set the tone for an evening of music that balanced emotional directness with technical mastery.<\/p>\n
The concert was a celebration of three composers\u2019 anniversaries this year: 2015 marks Part\u2019s 80th birthday, Sibelius\u2019s 150th, and the 85th of Velja Tormis, who is lionized in Estonia for his folklike, raw-edged works. But few of the works here were familiar to much of the audience.<\/p>\n
Part effectively follows Maria von Trapp\u2019s \u201cone word for every note\u201d guideline, but each word becomes a small shining unit of its own, sometimes in a single voice and sometimes layered with sounds, each bound to the other words around it within an aura of resonance. In the seven works gathered here, most written in the past 20 years, some of the texts gallop out like incantations \u2014 for instance, \u201cThe Woman with the Alabaster Box\u201d \u2014 but always with careful emotional calibrations; Christ\u2019s final word is presented in a shimmering curtain of sound. \u201cVirgencita,\u201d the most recent of the works on the program, has a Spanish tinge, opening with a contrast between extreme high and extreme low. The final \u201cAlleluia-Tropus\u201d climbed ascending scales to a point of near-ecstasy, which remained sustained and fading away in the high voices as the rest of the chorus again swirled downward.
\nAgainst the purity of \u201cSolfeggio\u201d came the opening of the second half, Tormis\u2019s \u201cAn Aboriginal Song,\u201d which offers a wilder side of wordlessness, the barely tamed voices sustained by the underlying growl of a large primitive drum (struck by Kaljuste). Tormis\u2019s verse songs have the familiar features of much folk music, along with its gimmicks, like the racing \u201cForced to get married,\u201d which gets faster and faster until the chorus finishes with an inarticulate cry. In the midst of the Tormis songs came the Sibelius work: melodious, elegant, and evocative, closing with a love scene enacted not in wild passion, but with a kind of reverent awe between two of the chorus\u2019s fine singers, while the others supported them in the background.<\/p>\n
The program\u2019s close, though, was a kind of primal scream, Tormis\u2019s \u201cCurse Upon Iron,\u201d with two snarling male soloists, a ululating chorus, and Kaljuste\u2019s drum beaten almost to the breaking point. You can\u2019t take art much further in the direction of pure emotion without getting into EST-like catharses; this choir, however, returned to perfect decorum as soon as the music stopped, and welcomed the aplause.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/entertainment\/music\/estonian-choir-brings-artistry-to-unfamiliar-music\/2015\/03\/03\/121e2f4c-c1e3-11e4-9271-610273846239_story.html<\/p>\n
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\u201cBut it doesn\u2019t mean anything!\u201d complains little Gretel in \u201cThe Sound of Music,\u201d faced for the first time with the seven notes (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si\/ti, do) of the tonal scale. And her governess, Maria, explains that you simply add words, \u201cone word for every note.\u201d The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, however, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}