Pärnu festival spirit - felt from afar

For the first time in seven years - yes, I even got to go to Estonia last summer, my only foreign travel in 2020 - I had to miss my favourite music festival in the world. Plans were laid, flights (reluctantly, since it's something I'm still trying to avoid) and hotels booked. Then my mother was rushed into hospital and, though much better by the time I was due to leave, still needed daily visits from me: when you're 90, your morale is the thing that most needs sustaining (she's home and in good spirits now). 

I have no doubt I did the right thing; I discovered natural beauties on the way to and from the cottage hospital, and I saw wonders operatic in London as some compensation. Every Pärnu concert, moreover, was filmed and streamed live on the website's TV channel for free (last year there was a very reasonable charge). You can still watch until the end of the month (tbc). The images here are all by photographic artist Kaupo Kikkas, an essential presence at every festival and one of quite a few good friends made in Pärnu (I know which are the real ones by now...) OK, the lineup is seriously blokey, but we've had soloists like Lisa Batiashvili and Viktoria Mullova at past festivals.

I'll confess I still have to see some of the events featuring the excellent Academy Orchestra; the first priority was the three Estonian Festival Orchestra concerts under doyen Paavo Järvi (he sent a very nice recorded message to say I was missed via the wonderful Lucy Maxwell-Stewart, who organised everything as usual). I get the feeling that each of the top soloists was inspired to give of his very best, working with that warmest of super-orchestras and conductors. It was vital to Paavo to get the pianist Lars Vogt along; the pianist has spoken so eloquently and with amazing perspective of his cancer here in an interview in  VAN Magazine, and we hope with all our hearts that he will pull through. Here are conductor and soloist together.

What follows is nothing like a review - it's some time since I watched the first concerts, after all - but a general impression remains that Vogt's playing in Mozart's C minor Concerto, K491, was on a level of sensitivity and response to everything around that I've not experienced before. Of course the wind, so crucial in the Larghetto, are among the best in the world - but this time I listened as much to the piano as I did to them. What a perfect encore, too, consolation and sorrow side by side so lightly etched in Brahms's  A major Intermezzo, Op. 118. 

The EFO repeated much of the same programme the following evening, but with Dvořák's Violin Concerto replacing the Mozart. Unlike that masterpiece, the Dvořák isn't among my concerto favourites, and memories of Truls Mørk in the Cello Concerto at the 2019 festival were still vivid. 

So I was taken aback by the sheer agile, febrile intensity with which Joshua Bell played it - again, visibly inspired by his colleagues, and sweating more than any of them (it was very hot and humid in Parnu that week, I'm told. You wouldn't hear this work played at a high pitch of brilliance anywhere.

I'll confess I was a bit disappointed in the choice of works announced for the visit of Emmanuel Pahud, the world's finest living flautist (that I know of - if anyone else has other information let me know). After all, Mozart's Flute Concerto isn't even as interesting as the one for flute and harp, and it seemed odd to resort to an orchestration of Poulenc's Flute Sonata. Why not Nielsen? 

But Pahud's artistry is compelling in itself, and there was a delicious surprise before the Mozart minuet finale - the perfectly apt interpolation of Arvo Pärt's Estländler (2006/2009). It's a joy to watch the amusement and pleasure of the orchestra's flutes, too, especially the smiles of Maarika Järvi (Paavo's sister, such a lovely person), as Paavo holds up the score for Pahud to follow.  I loved the complicity of the EFO woodwind, too, in Lennox Berkeley's Poulenc arrangement. The encore after the whole audience went wild a second time was Debussy's Syrinx - again, hard to imagine a more perfect arrangement.

There was equal magic from the players of the magnificent EFO - I persist in thinking it's like the Lucerne Festival Orchestra when Abbado was alive - in the chamber gala, always a highlight. I was, of course, cheering on my treasured friends Andres Kaljuste and Sophia Rahman, who were honouring the Tubin works in one of the main programmes - more anon - by performing the composer's transcription for viola of his Saxophone Sonata (1951). 

Not perhaps a work in which you can spot a clear identity - the second movement is utterly different in style from the first - but these two top musicians made magic of it.

The whole programme was well programmed as a classical/romantic sandwich with Estonian filling - on the other side of the interval came the sublime simplicity of Ester Mägi's Duos in National Idiom (1983). What a supremely subtle artist is Sharon Roffman, someone else I've come to treasure through Pärnu acquaintance, duetting with Maarika. 

I'm so proud that we picked a Mägi winner for the Europe Day Concert back in May - everyone loved the compact mood-shifts of The Sea. Any excuse to go back to that great concert, rendered all the more moving in this case by the nearly-100-year old composer's death the following week: I'll post the YouTube film without further comment.

Back at the Pärnu gala, let's just say about the horn quartet transcription of Carmen interludes that the work itself is a terrible mistake - there are other bits of the opera that would actually work in this combination. But it was so delightfully presented by another of the world's best instrumentalists, Alec Frank-Gemmill, and done with such visual panache that I shouldn't be too hard on it.

Here's another of Kaupo's best, of Alec in action. Not for nothing does KK have a reputation as the best photographer of musicians in the business.

As for the grand chamber finale, I kinda thought, Mozart Clarinet Quintet again, really? But never underestimate the creative takes of the orchestra's chief mascot, Matt Hunt. What fantasies he wrought with ornamentations on repeats; what freedom from all five players. I've never heard a performance of a great masterpiece quite as alive as this. Theodor Sink - star of last year's festival in Lepo Sumera's Cello Concerto - seemed perpetually tickled and delighted to be playing alongside the great clarinettist

and look at the fun - you may need to click to enlarge - shared between these two, leader Florian Donderer (playing viola on this occasion), fellow front-desker (and leader of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, another fine soloist too) Triin Ruubel and second violinist Emma Yoon.

Kaupo also took some great shots of Florian playing - this is just one.

A final note about the other orchestral works in the main programmes. Again, nothing had excited me in the prospectus. But while Tubin's Music for Strings of 1963 is so typical of much sombre music produced around that time, there are some real firecrackers in the suite from the ballet score Kratt (The Goblin, 1938-43, rev. 1960), and a chance for so many of the players to shine. Here's the unique trumpet of Vladislav Lavrik in the lineup.

About the premiere in the main concerts, Ülo Krigul's The Bow, I have nothing more to say than that when a new work starts with bells and dissonant brass, you know how it's going to go. Infinitely more fresh is Berwarld's Fourth ('Naive') Symphony of 1845. I actually used it as a stick to beat an entirely derivative symphony composed a century later, Ruth Gipps's Second Symphony, a waste of 20 well-executed minutes in the CBSO Prom on Thursday. The Swedish composer must have been a happy and wholesome kind of chap. A lot of his best ideas seem to stem from the fairy music of Mendelssohn, but have their own identity, like the quirky syncopated second theme of the Naive's first movement, delectably counterpointed by bassoon second time around. I'm now on a Berwald binge, courtesy of Järvi senior's two-CD set of the four symphonies with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Not on YouTube, so I give you  a mono recording by Igor Markevitch and the Berlin Philharmonic.

This is lovely, but the affection and light-spiritedness of the Estonian Festival Orchestra is even finer. Watch these concerts while you still can.

Perfect Pärnu day

This routine was adopted during my annual favourite week of the Pärnu Music Festival in time for my special visitor, who arrived two days after I did, and his birthday, followed by 'linden boys' Kristaps and Artis from Riga on the Friday. In the end, I'm glad I chose the slightly down at heel but ever so characterful Villa Katariina in Pärnu's garden zone next to the beach as a base, with its slightly sullen staff who left you to your own devices.

I'm sorry, owing to the evening concerts and the gatherings thereafter in the Passion Cafe, to have missed a glimpse of the tango and karaoke nights held at the hotel; J arrived back earlier one evening to see a scene featuring three people straight out of a Kaurismäki movie.

Breakfast at 8am under one of the fruit trees in the garden. A watchful eye was necessary; when I crossed the lawn to fetch something from another table, the resident crow made off with an entire bun.

Cross the road to the park on the other side. Once I spied a hedgehog

which I took as a good omen because, not having seen one since I used to garden, as a student, for a neighbour, over 30 years ago, I'd also spotted another in an equally beautiful place, the churchyard of Saint-Cybard de Cercles while waiting for the eclipse and escaping part of an organ recital (report on the Itinéraire Baroque here).

The park is full of healthily-lichened oaks which fringe the protected coastal meadows

but there are also stands of other trees, including the silver birches which have been suffering in Sweden (here temperatures went back up to 31 degrees for two days, but all remained green)

and it's good to see vegetable plots for all.

Turning out to walk alongside the Pärnu river with the docks on the other side, you pass garganeys ducking and diving, though on the first hot day they were very much idle.

I first saw a pair by the legendary stone pier

while on the other side the cattle grazing on the peninsula were reintroduced through the EU-funded 'Urbancows' programme, 'to restore the traditional semi-natural habitat of the area via livestock grazing'. The first day I saw them doing their thing,

but with the return of the heat they were all sheltering under the lone tree.

This end of the beach is the quietest for swimming; I've never seen the main strand so busy in any of the previous three years I've been here. There's the jetty to one side

from which you may look back up the river towards town,

and general views across the grasses to the peninsula.

To swim you must wade quite some way out in the warm, shallow waters off the eight-mile curve of the sandy beach. This is our largest posse, also including that greatest of clarinettists Matt Wolf. A distant people shot is as close as I'm allowed...

Next part: to walk along the water's edge back, passing large naked sunbathers and swimmers and the Women's Beach,

and then to the hotel to change. Heading for a second breakfast, you may encounter something as enchanting as this in the park on the other side of the road - 'are you performing somewhere soon?' 'We're not good enough!' -

and even - bizarrest - a Christmas bazaar in aid of a local musical organisation.

There is only one cafe to lounge at - the beautifully designed Supelsaksad (the term translates as 'the snobby dippers'). Its cinnamon and cardamom buns are the best in town; there's quite a queue for them when the establishment opens at 10am. We arrive later, sometimes just in time for lunch (also superb); the birthday lounge must have extended over some hours.

The garden's full of sparrows, which may be pests on the continent, but since we have so few in the UK now, I was happy to let them peck the plate clean once I'd finished.

Options now diverge. If there's a message that 'Arvo/Neeme is coming to the rehearsal', then you don't hang around but go straight to the concert hall. Where on the Wednesday lunchtime I found the master of the Third Symphony to be performed that evening intent with the score before hoiking himself up on to the platform to listen and advise.

Järvi Senior was there on Friday afternoon to rehearse the young Academy Orchestra in a fun little nothing of a march.

Afterwards he beckoned me to a chair and we chatted. I had no idea the great Kaupo Kikkas was lurking with his camera. He says he likes this shot because he knew our long-term story and thinks I'm looking pensive about it - though I fancy I was not ignoring Neeme but responding to viola-player Mari Adachi, whom I'd caught as she was passing us.

Another alternative haunt on some afternoons was the little wooden building and garden taken over the previous month by the cafe/restaurant Pipermunt - though we rather took agin the previously charming lady in charge when she was sniffy about serving us up plates of hummus and carrot salads before a concert ('the kitchens are very busy' - ha! Supelsaksad wouldn't do that). Still, I loved my place under a crabapple tree, where I managed on several occasions to get some work done,

with views across to St Catherine's Orthodox Church (1764, commandeered by the Empress of that name on a visit)

and the amusement of a tit at the crabapples.

Later, of course - with the option of a late-afternoon nap - there were the concerts, six spectacular nights, and the option of chats at the Passion Cafe. Not sure how the musicians managed it, staying up until 4am or later - which I did on the last night, but they had a Prom in two days' time.

Let's just say the love and adrenalin just kept flowing. Paavo Järvi commandeers the magic of the music-making by choosing his players carefully and then making everyone feel welcome; but Pärnu itself is a very special quiet place to work and thrive. And a perfect Pärnu day means a perfect day, period.