Estonian National Symphony Orchestra
cond. Olari Elts
German Hornsound
Phantasma (2018)
Symphony No 10 Æris (2020, dedicated to German Hornsound)
De profundis (2013, dedicated to Olari Elts)
Recorded September 2022, Estonia Concert Hall, Tallinn
ECM 2784
Erkki-Sven Tüür has long been acknowledged as one of today’s most significant orchestral composers. With a trademark combination of primordial, surging energy, explosive drama and filigree organic detail, the Estonian’s writing finds a natural home in large-scale novelistic forms such as the symphony and concerto. The Symphony No. 10, ‘Aeris’ (2021) combines the two – not for the first time in his output – to molten effect. The work is in four, throughcomposed movements and is typically abstract yet inviting of wider philosophical musing through its subtitle ‘Aeris’ – Latin for copper – which in turn suggests ‘Aeris’, meaning ‘air’. These find twin expression through the concertante quartet of French horns which comprises the work’s protagonist: situated at its heart, the quartet emanates messages from deep within and far beyond the orchestra, whose nature and import remain deliberately open to interpretation.
Conductor Olari Elts expertly steers an excellent Estonian National Symphony Orchestra in cycles of constant development and renewal, the rich, dense textures at once driven and spacious as, Tüür notes, the horn ‘motifs spread into the orchestra like memes that start changing and gradually take on lives of their own.’
Framing the symphony in complementary fashion are two, also substantial, works: Phantasma (2018) is a joint homage to Beethoven and Tüür’s father, whose record of the Coriolan Overture proved seminal to the youngster, while De Profundis (2013) weaves a silent prayer from its mutating intervallic ‘source code’. Both reference their source inspiration with subtlety – and are ultimately transcendent.
BBC Music Magazine 10 Jul 2025 Steph Power ****
(---) Its title evoking imagery of breathing and thus creation, the Tenth Symphony (2021) unfolds as four continuous movements between them revisiting this genre’s Classical archetype from a vantage distinctly of the present. The first of these draws from its salient ideas a cumulative development, out of which the horn quartet emerges as aspiring protagonist; a process whose inevitable falling short of its goal is offset with the simmering rhetoric of a ‘slow movement’, then by the impulsiveness of a ‘scherzo’ propelling the music to a point at which formal and expressive integration could be envisaged. The ‘finale’ attempts as much through its hymnic build-up towards an apotheosis that seems the more believable in its ultimate understatement.
The works on either side anticipate the symphony in several ways. In the case of Phantasma (2018), various totemic gestures are gradually elaborated and intensified (evidently against a backdrop of Beethoven’s Coriolan overture) prior to a febrile culmination that is cut short in the face of enveloping blankness. Conversely, De profundis (2013) expounds its defining themes at strategic junctures – as if embodying the individual, collective then universal that increasingly narrow before finally overcoming any divide between aspiration and attainment that is crucial to the Western tradition within which Tüür himself now consciously operates. (---)
Gramophone Sept 2025 Richard Whitehouse