The latest summer festival to announce that it will be performing live concerts to an audience is Estonia’s Pärnu Music Festival.

The festival’s 10th anniversary season will still go ahead from July 16-23, albeit with a re-imagined programme, yet to be announced. However, there will be a full week of concerts for an audience of approximately 300, with each concert live-streamed. The focus will be on Estonian artists, both young and established, and music will feature works by Estonian composers Lepo Sumera and Tõnu Kõrvits, including a premiere by the latter. Conducting master-classes will also be streamed live.

‘I am ecstatic that we will be able to celebrate the 10th anniversary of our festival in Pärnu’, said conductor Paavo Järvi. ‘Even though the musical celebrations will be smaller than originally planned, the spirit of Pärnu will compensate one hundred fold and I cannot wait to return to one of my favourite places to be reunited with so many friends on stage.

Meanwhile it has also been announced today that next Friday, June 5, the musicians of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra will be reunited with their Music Director Daniel Harding for their first concert together since lockdown, for a live-streamed performance. Berwaldhallen Play and P2 (Swedish Radio) will broadcast a programme featuring Mahler, Purcell and Bach plus Sibelius’s Symphony No 4 at 9pm CET.

Then on June 15 the Bergen Philharmonic (which last week opened the digital Bergen International Festival) has just announced that following the lifting of many virus-related restrictions in Norway its concert to mark Grieg's birthday will be its first since lockdown to be performed before an audience. ‘Strict risk-reducing measures’, including one metre social distancing, will apply, and there will be two performances that evening, each for 200 guests, ‘all of whom have contributed to fighting Covid-19’.