A journey to Pärnu

CLASSIC VOICE

Baltic Resistence

Paolo Locatelli, October 2026

A journey to Pärnu, where Estonia, forged by singing, gathers every year under the

guidance of the Järvidynasty,the musical mentors of a country living in fear of a new

invasion.

In Estonian history, music has played a fundamental role in forging and preserving

national identity. This first happened in the nineteenth century, when it became

possible to give structure to a tradition that had been almost exclusively oral, through

the formalisation of an initial body of indigenous repertoire, until then stifled by the

many successive foreign dominations. In this way, through choral singing and the

Üldlaulupidu (one of the most important amateur choral events in the world),

Estonians created a common canon and, with it, the roots of independence, which

was still to come. The process gathered momentum again in the post-war period and

reached its climax around the turn of the 1990s, when Estonia was seeking to free

itself from the Soviet yoke through the so-called “Singing Revolution”: a peaceful way

of reclaiming its own culture, weakened by a process of Russification that had

become increasingly oppressive over the decades. While the use of the spoken

Estonian language was ostracised under communism, singing remained a means of

preserving and reaffirming one’s identity.

That long thread has yet to be broken and, for sixteen years, every summer the

country’s musical heart has shifted to Pärnu, a seaside town on the southern Baltic

coast where, in February 1918, the declaration of independence of the newly born

republic was proclaimed, officially the following day in the capital, Tallinn.

Here, Paavo Järvi has founded a festival intended above all to be a festival for

Estonia and the Estonians: an assertion of the country’s existence to the world and a

consolidation of its cultural heritage built aroundt hree pillars — live music, local

composers and the training of young musicians, with the whole parallel universe of

masterclasses for instrumentalists and conductors offered by the Järvi Academy.

The Järvi family — Neeme, the illustrious patriarch, trained in Mravinsky’s St

Petersburg, and his children Paavo, Kristjan and Maarika — is a vivid embodiment of

Estonia today: roots sunk deep in a tenacious, longstanding tradition, with affiliations

and aspirations directed towards the West. The West in its healthiest sense:

pragmatic, cultured and cosmopolitan, at first out of necessity and then by choice,

animated by a very American notion of giving back.

The Pärnu Music Festival is therefore not the typical summer festival stringing

together big names — or at least, not only that. The big names are certainly there,

including Rudolf Buchbinder and Alice Sara Ott, but the festivalis also a project of

cultural architecture. It brings together several youth orchestras, whose musicians

also take part in some of the scheduled concerts and in the conducting

masterclasses.