ESTONIAN PHILHARMONIC CHAMBER CHOIR ERKKI-SVEN TÜÜR SINFONIETTA RIGA DANIEL REUSS ÄRKAMINE AWAKENING 1 ERKKI-SVEN TÜÜR (b. 1959) 1 Awakening (Ärkamine, 2011) 36’29 for mixed choir and chamber orchestra Commissioned by Tallinn – European Capital of Culture 2011 and the EPCC 2 The Wanderer’s Evening Song (Rändaja õhtulaul, 2001) 18’54 for mixed choir a cappella Commissioned by the EPCC; dedicated to Tõnu Kaljuste and the EPCC 3 Insula deserta (1989) 8’49 for string orchestra Commissioned by the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (1; 2) Sinfonietta Riga (1; 3) DANIEL REUSS, conductor Publisher: Edition Peters Recording: Methodist Church, Tallin, Estonia, 31.5.–3.6.2011 Executive Producer: Reijo Kiilunen Recording Producer, Editing & Mixing: Florian B. Schmidt Recording Engineer: Hansjörg Seiler ℗ 2011 Ondine Oy, Helsinki © 2011 Ondine Oy, Helsinki Booklet Editor: Jean-Christophe Hausmann Photos of the recording session: Kaupo Kikkas Design: Armand Alcazar 3 Universality, Time and Phenomenology in the Oeuvre of Erkki-Sven Tüür Erkki-Sven Tüür (b. 1959) began his musical career in the second half of the 1970s as leader of the progressive rock band In Spe, influenced by the music of King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Mike Oldfield, Frank Zappa, Yes and Genesis. He became a professional composer during the second half of the 1980s. Tüür studied percussion and flute at the Georg Ots Tallinn School of Music (1976–1980) and composition with Jaan Rääts at the Tallinn Conservatory (1980–1984). He also took private lessons with Lepo Sumera (1950–2000) and broadened his skills in the field of electronic music in Karlsruhe. Tüür’s oeuvre includes eight symphonies, several instrumental concertos, numerous chamber works and the opera Wallenberg (2001). Tüür is interested in a wide range of compositional styles, such as Gregorian chant, minimalism, dodecaphony and sound fields, and has long focussed on musical opposites – tonality versus atonality, regular repetitive rhythms versus irregular complex rhythms, tranquil meditativeness versus explosive eruptions – creating a ‘metalanguage’. Beginning with his Symphony No. 4 (‘Magma’, 2002), Tüür started using a technique he called the ‘vectorial method’, a flexible ‘source-code system’ based on intervals and vectors, with transitions between opposites becoming increasingly more important. The ensemble piece Oxymoron (2003) is the first pure example of this technique. Tüür has achieved independence in both his personal style and compositional technique. He lives on Hiiumaa, a beautiful, peaceful Estonian island. He is also closely connected to the pulsating world, however, composing commissions and working with international festivals, orchestras, ensembles, conductors and instrumentalists in Europe and on other continents. Tüür has become acknowledged worldwide as an innovative composer whose music also reaches a broader audience. Tüür’s music is both individual and universal; it is avant-garde, at the same time preserving traditions. Its musical material ranges from individualistic to non-individualistic textures, including clusters, sound fields, aleatoric counterpoint, and electronic sounds, incorporating them consistently into an aesthetically and emotionally satisfying experience. In one sense his music can be seen as a kind of consummation of Hanslick’s idea of ‘sonically moving forms’ (The Beautiful in Music, 1854), while including (sub)texts and embodying narrative concepts like culmination dramaturgy or music drama. 4 5 Tüür’s music can even be considered timeless, because it synthesizes various traditions and displays impulses and culminations, patterns and pulsations, contrasts and crucial changes in texture emerge many universal features attributed to canonic masterpieces. But it includes, expresses and embodies rapidly or slowly, remain continuously or move smoothly from one state of the musical material to time and space in many aspects and layers from the structural to the emotional dimensions, the the next. Tüür’s titles and the concepts of his works often support and awaken these impressions, constructed to the natural, the philosophical and metaphorical to the semiotic, the chronological to associations, analogies and synesthesia or natural imagery and phenomena. the subjectively experienced. The works on this CD present a cross section of Tüür’s oeuvre. Insula deserta (1989) for string Let us approach Tüür’s music from a phenomenological viewpoint here, recalling Merleau-Ponty, orchestra marks his international breakthrough. It was commissioned by the Ostrobothnian Chamber who said that ‘the future is not prepared behind the observer, it is the brooding presence moving Orchestra and premiered in Finland under Juha Kangas and has since been recorded and performed to meet him, like a storm on the horizon. the course of time is no longer the stream itself: it is all over the world. The title is borrowed from the poet Tõnu Õnnepalu, and for Tüür it refers to the the landscape as it rolls by for the moving observer. [time] arises from my relation to things. nature of Hiiumaa as well as The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) by Albert Camus, expressing the idea that Within things themselves, the future and the past are in a kind of eternal state of pre-existence and ‘absurdity is born from the contradiction of irrationality and the fierce desire for clarity, which man survival. What is past or future for me is present in the world’ (Phenomenology of Perception, always inherently longs for.’ We find the echo of these words throughout Tüür’s works up to the 1945/2002, p. 478). This can also be said of the quiddity and perception of Tüür’s music. The listener present day. As is often the case, Tüür’s music begins with a single sound, gradually expanding into who encounters it is touched, overwhelmed, astonished, exalted, even rendered speechless by the melodies and sound masses. Tüür points out that ‘the relationship between fragility and power is suggestiveness of its sounds, images and the memories it evokes. the key factor to be weighed’, but the tension and transition between individuality also emerges, for example, in a solitary melody and (quasi) non-individuality, expressed here both in repeated patterns The listener’s relationship to Tüür’s music is important to its comprehension. For experienced and sound field structures, which is characteristic not only of this particular work but also more listeners, Tüür’s music is like an open book. Memories of meanings, styles, images, times and generally in his oeuvre. We find modality, pentatonics and quartal harmony, while the melody begins spaces from the distant and recent past of Western music – from ancient music to jazz and rock – with a typical alternation of wider and smaller, consonant and dissonant intervals, balanced similar seemingly emerge from nowhere and fade back into sonically moving forms and the play of pure to ancient techniques. For the first time, Tüür composes out a widespread electronic effect (digital musical material. For listeners familiar with Estonian music, memories of that particular tradition delay) in the pulsating middle section, which is based on imitative structures in the orchestration. will appear, from symphonic-romantic and (pre)modern to avant-garde and post-modern elements, including the composer’s own works. But one never loses the certainty that this music is created The Wanderer’s Evening Song [Rändaja õhtulaul] (2001) for mixed choir was written for the 20th by Tüür alone, since it is characterized by unique features of Tüür’s metalingual and vectorial-based anniversary of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (EPCC) and is dedicated to the choir and thinking. In particular, individual melodic structures (with characteristic interval combinations and its founder and conductor Tõnu Kaljuste. Tüür combines several poems by the well-known Estonian vectorially important trajectories), the treatment of combined modality, and rhythmic and temporal poet Ernst Enno (1875–1934) from the first half of the 20th century with an astonishingly consistent features are highly typical and recognizable throughout his oeuvre. For the less experienced listener narrative of an imaginative wanderer, who is bewitched by the sombre silence of the northern woods, or someone approaching it from a purely phenomenological standpoint, Tüür’s music is like a longing for home, and marvels at the golden strings and rays reaching across the deep water and magic book. While pages turn, culminations appear, and natural phenomena like storms, volcano life as the one blissful way to reach God and His light. Both the music and the romantic poems – eruptions and frozen tsunamis roll over; single notes and motives, gestures and abstract narratives, recalling Goethe and Rückert – are composed with dramatic tension between dissonant textures, 6 7 brightening chords and shifting tonality. It raises the listener to a higher level of consciousness, which is a kind of natural religiosity also found in other works by Tüür, especially in the main piece on this CD. Awakening [Resurrectio, Ärkamine] (2011) for mixed choir and chamber orchestra was commissioned by the EPCC and the city of Tallinn, the European Capital of Culture for 2011; the world premiere was presented in Tallinn by the EPCC and Sinfonietta Rīga under the choir’s chief conductor, Daniel Reuss, in spring 2011. The texts are Estonian poetry by Juhan Liiv (1864– 1913), Ernst Enno, Jaan Kaplinski (b. 1941) and Doris Kareva (b. 1958), along with