Requiem (1994)
(for chamber chorus, strings, piano and triangle)

Merkin Concert Hall, New York. June 1, 2003. Cantori New York. Mark Shapiro. 

(---) But the program's highlight was a major piece: the Requiem of the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur in its American premiere. Strong and distinctive, it explored every aspect of texture and text, trying different permutations of the combination of strings and voices, adding a piano to the orchestra and opening it up to create, on its strings, ominous clouds of sound. Curtis Macomber, the concertmaster, sent out fragments of a solo line while the alto soloist, Alison Cheeseman – who sang with startling purity, a truly innocent and lovely sound – sent up an aching "Recordare." Later Mr. Tuur had the violins scratch like buzzing insects in a pillowy cloud, supporting a soft vocal line. A Requiem for the concert hall as well as the chorus, the work moved inexorably from the opening lines, intoned darkly and richly by the basses, to the full-chorus conclusion, "Lux aeterna," a fierce, consuming blaze of light.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. Nov.1998.
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. Tõnu Kaljuste

NOT SO long ago, a concert of Estonian religious music would have almost certainly guaranteed empty halls. But this week's three-stop tour by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tallin Chamber Orchestra under Tõnu Kaljuste, with music by Erkki-Sven Tuur and Arvo Part, quickly sold out the vast interior of Durham Cathedral, packed out Huddersfield Town Hall, and saw a large queue of people who were waiting for returns outside the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

Arvo Part, now 53, has become something of a New Age icon, the plain figures of his "mystic minimalism" chiming well with the body of taste that has reacted against the excesses of Modernism, as indeed Part turned from his own earlier serialism.

Tuur, who was born in 1959, seems to be evolving towards the same ecstatic spirituality. His brief Passion for strings (1993), begins with simple phrases, low in cellos and basses, but then grows more and more animated as folk-like fragments gradually lift the focal point of the texture. The music, whose modal contours give it an ageless quality, is intensely beautiful and does not seem to resist the onset of dissonance in the first violins: on its first encounter with this sign of ugliness, it dies away in pained silence.

Tuur's Requiem (1994) inhabits the same austerely ecstatic soundworld. Again, it grows from an opening low in the chorus, the strings weaving increasingly frantic commentary around the vocal lines as they move up to the first climax at "Tuba mirum", with the piano now adding a manic commentary and the sopranos and mezzos interjecting a few brief shrieks that recall the shamanistic music of his  countryman, Veljo Tormis - this being the first time that this has sounded so explicitly Estonian.

The choir outlines a dislocated chorale before silence suddenly
crashes in, and the solo soprano movingly intones the  "Recordare". The choir slowly re-establishes the onward movement, ignoring the piano which suggests that one of Messiaen's exotic birds had perched on Tuur's score. Again, a dip into calm growth as the music moves towards the great cry of "Requiem eternam" that crowns the whole work; it
fades to nothing and a single triangle stroke kisses it farewell. (---)