Had the life of Lepo
Sumera not been cut tragically short
by heart failure in 2000 at the premature
age of fifty, I suspect that his music
would have been far better known to
British audiences.
Sumera led something
of a double musical life, combining
composing with a reputation as one of
the foremost activists, teachers and
administrators in Estonian musical life.
So much so that from 1989 to 1992 he
served as Estonia’s Minister of Culture,
subsequently taking up the post of Chairman
of the Estonian Composer’s Union which
he held until his death.
On a musical level
and not unlike his younger Estonian
compatriot Erkki-Sven Tüür
(who incidentally is acknowledged with
special thanks in the sleeve-note),
Sumera’s music underwent a number of
radical stylistic metamorphoses before
he ultimately found what he felt to
be his true voice. In his early years
Sumera embraced the avant-garde with
both arms including a pioneering contribution
to the development of electro-acoustic
music, before subsequently undergoing
a ‘sea change’ in 1981 (hence the significance
of the above Two Pieces from the
Year 1981) when he adopted a new-found
language of diatonic post-modernity.
This manifested itself in a form of
minimalism that the writer of the sleeve-note
attributes to Sumera having developed
from the "archaic Estonian runo
song"; the more familiar American
school of minimalism being pretty much
unknown behind the iron curtain until
the mid-1980s. As can be heard from
these pieces, the results of this change
often allow materials to sit side by
side in unconcealed stylistic contrast
whilst other pieces attempt to smooth
over the differences to some degree.
Although numerous parallels
that can be drawn between Sumera and
Tüür, the work of the latter
is perhaps the more muscular of the
two. Arguably it demonstrates the most
inventive and probing compositional
intellect. However, this useful collection
of, spanning the eighteen years from
the crucial Two Pieces from the Year
1981 to the song, Stars,
one of the last pieces he wrote before
his death, show Sumera to be a composer
with an undoubted gift for communicating
directly and intuitively with the listener.
At one level the Two
Pieces have relatively little in
common other than the year of their
composition and the rhythmic impetus
that permeates them. The first, The
Piece from the Year 1981, weaves
a gradually embellished chain-like melody
over a hypnotic, ostinato-like accompaniment.
The music certainly draws the listener
into its world and Sumera clearly thought
highly of the work for he used it as
the basis for his First Symphony
of the same year. The second of the
two pieces, Pardon, Fryderyk!
takes as its starting point the Mazurka
Op. 17 No. 4 by Chopin, again employing
ostinato figurations in the left hand
but this time allowing the melody more
freedom to take on a noticeably eastern
feel. In a quasi-improvised central
passage the pianist drums on the body
of the instrument although on this recording
the "drumming" is performed
by a tap dancer, as originally envisaged
by the composer and emphasising the
importance of rhythm in Sumera’s music.
Scenario, of 1995, progresses
from an angular unison melodic opening
featuring the whole ensemble via a series
of sharply contrasting episodes, which
range from the complex and more overtly
avant-garde to passages of introspective
repose. As with Tüür, Sumera
allows these contrasting materials to
co-exist with no attempt to weld their
respective sound worlds together, until
the final bars meet in repeated unison
consonance. The Silent Odalisque
is the first of four related pieces,
being the only one of the four for solo
flute (the others are all scored for
flute, guitar and cello). The material
once again explores territory of considerable
virtuosity and extended technique interwoven
with melodic passages of relative diatonic
simplicity. The work which lends its
title to the disc, To Reach Yesterday,
is the most impressive of the six works
on the disc, effectively an impassioned,
ten minute sonata for cello and piano
that explodes into rhythmically figurative
dynamism shortly before its mid-point.
The intriguing title is not what it
seems, stemming from the composer losing
the score from his computer when the
machine crashed. Consequently with the
commission deadline passed, he spent
a night writing the work out by hand
from memory, hence To Reach Yesterday.
The two brief vocal works that conclude
the disc set both stem from the final
months of the composer’s life, a haunting
setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128
all the more atmospheric for its simplicity,
together with a more strident and less
effective setting of Sonnet 121. Stars
sets a poem by exiled Estonian poetess
Marie Under and like the first of the
Shakespeare sonnets adopts Sumera’s
simpler melodic style to create a song
of poignant directness.
The musicians, all
of whom are graduates of the Estonian
Academy of Music in Tallin, acquit themselves
well and are aided by a clear, well-detailed
recording.
In conclusion, as with
so much music now emerging from the
Baltic states, Sumera’s music is well
worthy of exploration. His substantial
output, including six symphonies, was
cruelly curtailed whilst he was at the
apparent height of his powers. It was
with a final biting irony therefore,
that one of his last major works, Heart
Affairs (1999) took its impulse
from actual cardiographic charts of
the rhythmic patterns of the human heart.
Christopher Thomas
Pille Lill (soprano); Marje Lohuaru (piano) 