Tune in for a taste of the Baltic Blues

An intriguing series of concerts aims to explore northern Europe's musical heritage which has been making waves over the past decade, writes  ARMINTA WALLACE.

FOR MANY YEARS now, we've been turning our cultural heads, like sunflowers, towards the Mediterranean. And why not? Great art, great music, great landscapes. But here's the thing. Great art, great landscapes and - especially - great music are also to be found if you head north instead of south. Soaring church steeples, brooding forests, late-night light on wide streets and mountain lakes: as a body of water the Baltic may lack English-language chronicles of the calibre of Claudio Magris's Danubeor Neal Ascherson's masterly Black Sea, but the cities on Europe's northern coasts have been making waves on the international music scene over the past decade. Now an intriguing three-month series of concerts called Baltic Bluesaims to explore this - our - northern musical heritage.

The series is the brainchild of Paul Hillier, founder of the highly-regarded Hilliard Ensemble and newly-appointed choral director of the National Chamber Choir. An Englishman who lives in Copenhagen and has just finished a stint as artistic director of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Hillier has thrown himself into the discovery of the music of the Baltic region and recorded a number of award-winning CDs, including the series Baltic Voices, with musicians from the area. Over the coming months, he will offer Irish audiences the chance to explore this astonishingly varied repertoire, and get to know some of the names and personalities of our northern neighbours, both ancient and modern, in the company of the National Chamber Choir. The choir will also tour to Germany at the end of July (see panel).

The series opens with music by 16th century Italian composers who lived and worked in Baltic cities. "I thought it would be interesting to make a Baltic renaissance programme, because this music is probably unknown to most people in Ireland," says the Danish conductor and composer Bo Holten. "But don't be afraid if you don't know the names - the music is of a consistently high quality. In the second half of the 16th century, Italians took over the musical world. Before that, everyone had gone to Italy; during this period there was an influx of Italian musicians to the Baltic nations."

It's a bit like the situation in the English Premier League at the moment, he says - lots of foreign names equals high quality all round. "Luca Marenzio was one of the big stars of the day. He was simply bought by King Sigismund, a Swedish prince who became king of Poland - all very Nordic - and who wanted to employ the greatest composer of the day to connect him to the courts in Krakow and Warsaw. Marenzio also spent time in Vilnius. On the other hand, some of the composers on our programme, even if they have Latin names, are locals. Johann Stroebius, for instance, is a local boy. He came from Riga."

As for the idea that these Baltic courts were all sombre, straight-laced places - forget it. Holten, an early music specialist who founded the group Ars Nova in 1979, is currently working on his sixth opera, based on a hugely successful novel by the Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist. It features an insane Danish teenage king, a German doctor, an illicit affair, an execution - and a revolution. The doctor in question got hold of the political reins in Denmark in 1770, and promptly introduced legislation on free speech and freedom of the press according to his own principles, which were those of the French enlightenment. "Basically, we had the French revolution in Denmark 20 years before the French did - but it was a revolution from above," says Holten.

Unfortunately the indefatigable physician also had an affair - and a baby - with the queen, thus ensuring his eventual execution by the outraged aristocracy. "But the political side of it, the fight for common sense, is - I think - just as much a topic of our day, when we see many different religious strands in conflict over the world."

THE DUBLIN CONCERT contains a taste of Holten's composition in the shape of A Time for Everything, a setting of a Danish poem based on a passage from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. "The idea of the piece is that goodness and evil lives in all of us, and that the most evil things can come out of the best things - and the opposite. I have constructed a piece which turns peace into war, and shows that somehow, it all comes from the same stem. So the same musical material occurs in very, very contrasting ways."

As for renaissance, Holten says that in recent years the Baltic region has been undergoing something of the kind itself. "As a Scandinavian it's interesting to see how the natural Baltic connections are recurring," he says. "After the second World War, when the Iron Curtain came down, we forgot to think of the Baltic Sea as a trafficway because it was so totally closed. Now we are rebuilding these connections." In fact, he says, the big freeze which took place during the 20th century was a totally artificial one. "In the 19th century, my grandfather's brother was employed in Riga, and that was quite normal for somebody from Copenhagen. In the 16th century, there was an enormous traffic between the northern German and Polish Baltic cities - Koenigsberg, Gdansk, and Riga, which was a very important cultural city. Don't forget that Wagner was tied to the opera house there in the early 1840s. It was a highly populated area with lots of cultural exchange; that's the picture I'm aiming at with this programme."

The theme of exchange is echoed in the second concert, to be conducted by Paul Hillier. It will focus on music both ancient and modern from the three Christian churches of the Baltic region: Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox. These range from music suffused with medieval chant through a piece about the attempted conversion of the pagan Finns by an English bishop through to the work of the Danish contemporary composer Per Norgard, a big fan of Balinese gamelan orchestras. By contrast the third programme in the series, with the Latvian conductor Kaspars Putnins, will be an all-Latvian affair.

The final concert in the series will feature the Rascher Saxophone Quartet, founded in 1969 by the virtuoso saxophone player Sigurd Rascher, for whom Hindemith, Glazunov and some 200 other contemporary European composers wrote solo pieces. One of these was the Estonian composer Errki-Sven Tuur, whose 18-minute Meditatio for choir and quartet opens the programme. "We've performed it nearly 20 times," says the American tenor saxophonist Bruce Weinberger, who has been with the quartet since it began. "Another work which is very popular with the public is Erland von Koch's suite of miniature pieces for saxophone quartet. This was premiered in one of our very first concerts, way back," he says. "It's based on a Scandinavian folk style, so every now and then you feel yourself walking through a dark forest in Sweden, while other movements are very happy and lively."

BALTIC BLUESWILL come to a close with a setting by the German composer Bernd Franke of On The Dignity Of Man, a famous libertarian text which Weinberger studied in high school back home in the States. "It influenced both the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The text talks about the special place of every single individual on the earth. We've performed it quite a few times, and people like it a lot."

Like all the musicians involved in this concert series, Weinberger has his own take on the Baltic. "I live in Switzerland, but I go up there often," he says. "When I think Baltic, I think of small countries with a lot of musical talent - more than one would even imagine possible." What this series proposes is that for a few months at least, we orient ourselves northward for a change. And here's another thing. The timing couldn't be better, with the concerts superbly placed to make the most of our long, bright, early summer evenings. Ah, the north. Don't you just love it?

MAKE A DATE: WHERE TO CATCH THE BALTIC BLUES

THE opening concert of the series Baltic Bluesis at the National Gallery of Ireland tonight at 6.30pm. Bo Holten conducts the National Chamber Choir in a programme of music from the Baltic renaissance.

Paul Hillier conducts a selection of Baltic sacred music from the Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox traditions at the Harty Room, Queen's University Belfast on June 11th at 7.45pm, and in the Church of Saints Michael and John, Exchange Street, Dublin, on June 12th at 6.30pm.

A programme of Lithuanian music is on offer from the choir with conductor Kaspars Putnins on June 25th (Queen's University, 7.45pm) and June 26th (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 6.30pm), while for the concluding concert on July 24th the choir will be joined by the Rascher Saxophone Quartet with conductor James Wood (National Gallery of Ireland, 6.30pm). The National Chamber Choir will then tour to Germany, with concerts at the MDR Midsommer Festival, Leipzig, on July 26th and at the Festival Europaische Kirchenmusik, Schwäbisch Gmünd, on July 27th.