Reviews from Baltic and Estonian Music Days in 3 languages
Pierre Rigaudière from Diapason in La musique balte sous les projecteurs européens à Tartu writes about Tarmo Johannes performing my composition Incantare:
“Dans ce contexte, la flûte basse quelque peu chamanique mais remarquablement précise d’un Tarmo Johannes arbore dans Incantare (2018) de Justina Repečkaité un visage inattendu – l’interprète est invité à chanter dans un instrument augmenté par une électronique très vocale.”
A 5against4 review on Incantare:
“Taking first prize for the most startling venue used at this year’s festival was Tartu University’s Museum of Natural History, where the members of Ensemble U: performed – and we all stood – in the midst of a vast menagerie of live and preserved animals. The three pieces that made the strongest impression did this by (unintentionally) playing into the connotations of the natural world surrounding us on all sides. Justina Repečkaitė‘s Incantare, being premièred in a new version devised by flautist Tarmo Johannes for bass flute and electronics, spoke like a primordial voice, expanding into a carefully executed ritualistic act, the precision of which (Johannes is an astonishingly precise performer) was periodically broken up by wildness. At times, the live and electronic sounds sounded as twin strands of this same act, with the electronics often coming across like a more literal vocal mouthpiece to the more abstract and stylised material emanating from the flute. ”
Lawrence Dunn from bachtrack writes about Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, led by British conductor Clement Power concert in a review Oceanic swells, orchestral tangles: Baltic & Estonian Music Days:
“Justina Repečkaitė’s Vellum was the most successful work on the programme. The music seemed confident and direct, something that can be difficult for many composers for whom orchestral pieces are relative rarities. The music felt straightforwardly au courant too. Constructed like other pieces in the programme from waves of dissonant harmonic pile-up, at the piece’s centre was a repeated, unrelenting section built around upward glissandos in horns and strings, sharp violent crescendi and noisy percussion. This section drives itself home, before a short, sinister conclusion, which ends almost as soon as it arrives. Arresting and contemporary.”
Deutchlandfunk podcast in Selbstbewusste Musikkultur – die Baltic and Estonian Music Days in Tartu features an excerpt of Incantare (2018) performed by Tarmo Johannes while presenting the Ensembel U: concert at the Natural Hisytroy Museum of Tartu.
