Tõnu Kõrvits: Mirror

Mirror was Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits’s first release for ECM’s New Series, recorded in February 2013 at the Methodist Church in Tallinn and issued in March 2016. It brings together an unusual combination of forces: the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste, the German cellist Anja Lechner (long associated with ECM through her work with Gidon Kremer and the Rosamunde Quartet), jazz vocalist Kadri Voorand, and Kõrvits himself on kantele, the Estonian plucked zither closely related to the Finnish kantele and other Baltic box zithers.

The album opens with a fantasy built on a song by Veljo Tormis, the towering figure of 20th-century Estonian choral music and a clear reference point for Kõrvits’s own choral writing, a deliberate gesture that places Mirror explicitly within an Estonian lineage rather than presenting Kõrvits as an isolated voice. The rest of the disc consists of world premiere recordings of Kõrvits’s own compositions, which move fluidly between the orchestra, choir and Lechner’s cello, with Voorand’s voice used more as a further instrumental colour than as a conventional vocal soloist.

About the composer

Tõnu Kõrvits (born 1969) is one of the leading Estonian composers of his generation, known particularly for choral and vocal writing rooted in Estonian folk material and landscape, in a lineage that runs through Tormis and, in a different way, Arvo Pärt, though Kõrvits’s own harmonic language is distinctly his own, less austere than Pärt’s tintinnabuli style and more overtly lyrical. Mirror sits alongside a substantial catalogue of choral, orchestral and chamber works, several of which have gone on to further ECM recordings.

About the performers

Anja Lechner has recorded extensively for ECM across a career spanning classical, contemporary and improvised music, and her presence here, alongside strictly Estonian forces otherwise, signals how Mirror was conceived as a genuinely international collaboration rather than a purely domestic showcase. Tõnu Kaljuste, who conducts, is among the most recorded Estonian conductors of his generation, closely associated on disc with both Arvo Pärt and Veljo Tormis, which makes him a natural fit for a programme that explicitly invokes Tormis in its opening bars. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, founded in 1981, has built an international reputation as one of the finest chamber choirs working in this repertoire, with a discography spanning Pärt, Tormis, Britten and beyond.

A note on this page

The original mmmusic review of Mirror was written by Will Tamblyn in April 2016, its existence is independently confirmed by both the Estonian Music Information Centre and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir’s own websites, which cite it by name among the album’s press coverage. The original text itself didn’t survive in any archive we could recover, so rather than guess at what it said, the review above has been written fresh from verified facts about the recording, its performers and its context.