Pärt and Tormis. Estonian National Male Choir

Estonian National Male Choir
Conductor Mikk Üleoja

Programme:
Tormis. “Song of the Flat Land”
Pärt. “Which was the son of ...”
Tormis. “Dialectical Aphorisms”
Pärt. “Zwei Beter”
Tormis. “Tõmbtuul”
Pärt. “And one of the Pharisees ...”
Tormis. “Hamlet Songs” (I and II)
Pärt. “The Deer's Cry”
Tormis. “Meie varjud”
Pärt. “Da pacem Domine”

In 2025, the world celebrated both Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday and the 95th anniversary of Veljo Tormis’s birth. The Estonian National Male Choir’s concert programme “Pärt & Tormis” originated from an initiative by the Arvo Pärt Centre to hear the Estonian National Male Choir in a programme dedicated to the work of these two jubilees.

But how do you compile a programme of music by two composers when one of them—Arvo Pärt—has written only one a cappella work for male choir? Thus, at the request of the male choir and with the approval of the Pärt family, three new arrangements for male choir were made for this programme from Arvo Pärt’s existing choral works, by Kuldar Schüts and Tauno Aints.

The programme was performed at numerous Estonian summer festivals during the composers’ jubilee summer, and now comes before audiences in Tallinn and Pärnu for the first time. The programme creates unexpected thematic parallels between the two composers’ seemingly different worlds. For example, “Song of the Flat Land” and Arvo Pärt’s “Which Was the Son of …”. At first glance, these works are different, yet they speak of the same thing—descent. Tormis writes: “Here you were born on flat land,” emphasising a sense of belonging rooted in the land and nationality. Pärt, in turn, uses a liturgical text from the Catholic Church in which, during Advent, all the forefathers in Jesus’s genealogy are read out by name, back to Adam and ultimately to God. The themes are similar, but the mode of expression is different. There are more such fascinating dialogues in the concert programme.

The concert has no interval and lasts approximately 1 hour 15 minutes.