The festival founded and stewarded by Paavo Järvi in the Estonian resort of Pärnu is rapidly shedding its ‘well-kept secret’ status. A new streaming platform won’t do anything to reverse that process.

Nor has the Pärnu Music Festival’s artistic ambition ever stood still, as witness the fruits of the 2024 event now available to watch on said platform. Another recent development has been the Järvi Academy, which sits at the other end of the talent pipeline to the event’s own Estonian Festival Orchestra – an ensemble modelled in part on its namesake in Lucerne that combines concertmasters and principals from around Europe with the best instrumentalists in the Baltics.

The Järvi Academy, led by Paavo, brother Kristjan and father Neeme, trains players and conductors. Its ‘Final Concert’ (as titled on the listings) involves all nine of the latter academicians leading both the Järvi Academy Youth Orchestra and the Pärnu City Orchestra. The two conductors to watch out for are the last to appear. Mirian Khukhunaishvili’s career is well on track, and you can see why in the response he gets from the youth orchestra in the ebullient final movement of Dvořák’s Symphony No 7.

Less experienced but with an impressive technique and a strong kernel of communicative talent is Guro Haugli, who sensitively marshals the ‘Elegi’ from Alfvén’s Gustav II Adolf, Op 49. It’s unfortunate for Haugli that Neeme Järvi gamely accepts an invitation to conduct the piece straight after her as an encore, exploring more dimensions in it and proving the old adage that anyone who stands in front of an orchestra draws a distinct sound from it (in his case, what a sound).

If you’ve been in Pärnu during festival time, you’ll be familiar with the event’s combination of high-end artistry with low-key atmosphere – a feature that comes across on the broadcasts and even more in the probing quirkiness of the programming. An epic ‘Chamber Gala’ concert opens with Pärt’s haiku-like Scala cromatica, continuing with Tõnu Kõrvits’s viola sonata Sketches of Solitude (as spare and intense as it sounds) and Maria Kõrvits’s Disconnection/Melting, receiving its premiere. We then hear Victor Ewald’s Brass Quintet No 2 from 1905, distillations of slow movements from Mahler’s Second and Fifth Symphonies and a performance of Raff’s Octet for Strings, on its toes in every sense and charismatically led by Triin Ruubel, a concertmaster of both the EFO and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra.

What you want to hear, of course, is Paavo Järvi’s EFO – playing, as are the concerts mentioned, in the bijou concert hall that Neeme Järvi petitioned the town to build two decades ago. The best from the EFO is the concert from July 13, which underlines the orchestra’s cherishing of local music. It opens with Ester Mägi’s Vesper – a classic Baltic prayer for strings. Next up is the first performance of Tõnu Kõrvits’s accordion concerto Dances, played by Ksenija Sidorova. This is a highly atmospheric piece inhabiting its own enchanted realm, opening with a gentle folk song on the accordion that infiltrates the orchestra like waves lapping gently up on Pärnu’s white-sand beach. There are some extended techniques but nothing written against the instrument. For all the music’s charm, the look on Sidorova’s face tells you how seriously she takes it. Another accordion-and-orchestra piece, Pēteris Vasks’s The Fruit of Silence, follows – as subtle and elusive as a passing breeze.

The concert ends with a Järvi speciality: Bizet’s Symphony in C. This performance shows the EFO’s class in the context of standard repertoire and is possessed of the same lithe clarity the conductor brought to bear on Brahms and Beethoven in his recordings with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. The EFO shares a concertmaster with that orchestra – Florian Donderer, whose elegant solos season the unusual structures of the Scherzo and whose dynamic presence contributes to the sense of joyous culmination in the finale. Other EFO concerts include Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony, Elgar’s Cello Concerto (soloist Alisa Weilerstein), Bruch’s Violin Concerto No 1 (soloist Hans Christian Aavik), Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (soloist Kirill Gerstein) and the world premiere of Helena Tulve’s Wand’ring Bark.

No such joy at the end of Mahler’s Symphony No 6, which had a remarkable outing from the Berlin Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel in June – now published on the Digital Concert Hall. With neither a score nor the usual rail on the back of the conductor’s podium for safety, Dudamel presides over a performance of extremely high definition whose plenteous mannerisms are all about character and never about attention or distracting from what is, in the case of the first movement, a compellingly sustained line in which all is fed fiercely into a mincer of a development section.

It is a performance deeply felt, exquisitely balanced and ideally paced in relation not just to speed but to sound and the idea of ‘depth’ – how deeply you want to pile-drive those opening trudges (Dudamel, unlike many other conductors, doesn’t overdo it and get stuck in the mud). I’ve never known the Scherzo (played second), with unusually vivid percussion, wind down into the low woodwinds of its dying embers more theatrically. The big blossoming in the Andante moderato has the character of a revelation and truly shortens the breath, coming after pages and pages played with low sentimentality but high animation. Dudamel treats the pregnant, straining opening of the finale like the super-sized slow introduction to a Haydn symphony. The rest of the movement is characterised by the conductor’s combination of shape and abandon, all of it – right up to the final gesture – meticulously controlled.

I will argue until my last breath that Albert Herring, Britten’s most theatrically successful and narratively perfect opera, can teach us at least as much as a Mahler symphony. Opera North’s revival of Giles Havergal’s 2013 production of the work reimagined it ‘in the round’ – or, rather, with a small audience seated antiphonally on either side of the action at the Howard Assembly Room, with Garry Walker’s 10‑piece band at one end.

Havergal has always had an eye on this opera’s critique of the stifling awfulness of the British class system and Britten’s sense, in the late 1940s, that a moribund social code was about to be overturned. Havergal lets the characters indulge their Midsomer Murders-like caricatures but there is always something more to them: the vicar’s acute insecurity; the sense of Florence Pike enacting a classic cycle of abuse; Miss Wordsworth’s socially induced neurosis. Britten’s village Valkyrie, Lady Billows – the most enjoyably repulsive creation in comic opera since Verdi’s Falstaff (the score to whose opera was on Britten’s desk as he wrote Herring) – is played with a near-constant scowl by Judith Howarth.

The cameras that have made the performance available on OperaVision capture faces in the audience as much as in the cast; Budd picks out his Mrs Williams (the silent donor of ‘a flagpole and two dozen cups’) from its front row while we are privy to the litany of disapproving looks lasered at her son by Mrs Herring even when neither are singing. Watching this fast-paced production, with plenty of movement through the performing space – cycling included – you notice how Britten and Crozier’s work has the speed and quick-witted interplay of a contemporary TV drama.

There are some delectable touches. The chemistry between Sid and Nancy is the best I have seen, tapping what we’ve come to recognise as the cool sexiness of the late 1940s (Havergal references both Parsifal and Tristan when the two spike Albert’s drink). The dance on the fugue ‘May King, May King’ is a bullseye of light-hearted class commentary. Albert’s unease in the crowning ceremony might be slightly overplayed, but it underlines the complete transformation after his first taste of alcohol – an element well caught by Dafydd Jones, who sings suavely. The voice that really stops you in your tracks is that of Katie Bray as Nancy – a mellow, glowing mezzo whose distinctive vocal colouring put me in mind of a favourite singer, Christine Schäfer. Sound isn’t what it could be, with the boom of a bathroom and a lack of clarity that can curdle voices and muddy some of the best instrumental harmonies. But don’t let that stop you.

The events

Pärnu Festival 2024

parnumusicfestival.tv

Mahler Symphony No 6

BPO / Dudamel

digitalconcerthall.com

Britten Albert Herring

Opera North

operavision.eu

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