Kerem: Symphony No. 3 and String Sextet

Toccata Classics has a habit of turning up composers you feel embarrassed not to have known about, and Mihkel Kerem is the latest case in point. Estonian, a violinist by training, evidently a man who thinks in long paragraphs of sound rather than epigrams — this new disc confirms an impression I first got from his violin sonatas a year or so back: here is somebody who writes as though the last hundred years of compositional anxiety happened to him personally, and he came out the other side with his tonal compass more or less intact, if occasionally spinning.

The symphony is the reason to buy this disc, whatever reservations one might have about its subtitle. Symphony No. 3, “For the Victims of Communism“ announces itself as a document, a memorial, an argument — and Kerem’s own booklet note, wrestling with the politics of naming things, is more tortured than the music itself, frankly. Whatever one makes of a title that conflates ideology with the machinery of state terror (a distinction worth making, and not made here), the piece works on its own purely musical terms, which is really the only test that matters twenty minutes into a listen.

Kerem tells us he found Shostakovich the only usable key into this material, and you hear it — not as imitation but as inheritance, the way a grandson inherits a jawline. The first movement builds through accumulating ostinati toward something that edges disconcertingly close to film music, a relentless repeated cell that a stricter modernist would find embarrassing and that I found, on repeated listening, weirdly potent — Kerem knows exactly how long to let a rhythmic idea overstay its welcome before it curdles into menace. Elsewhere the writing turns almost Stravinskian, block harmonies colliding like ice floes, brass barking in short percussive stabs that recall The Rite without ever quoting it. It is a young-ish composer’s symphony (he was in his early twenties when he wrote it) but there’s nothing callow about the orchestration, which has real weight and specific gravity — timpani used sparingly and therefore devastatingly, string writing that knows how to thin out to a single desperate line.

The Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble that spent decades under Neeme Järvi’s shadow building a discography most Western listeners have never sampled, plays this with evident conviction under Mikk Murdvee. The strings dig in with an almost gritty tone in the symphony’s darker pages — not the burnished sheen you’d get from, say, the Concertgebouw, but something rawer and more honest, which suits Kerem’s material better than polish would. Brass intonation wavers fractionally at a couple of exposed moments in the finale; I mention it only because everything else here is so persuasive that the lapse shines.

Lamento, for viola and strings, is the emotional gut-punch of the program — eight minutes and fifty-some seconds of unbroken desolation, and Murdvee, doubling as soloist here, plays it with a covered, almost throttled tone that suggests grief rather than displaying it. There’s a long-breathed melodic line here that owes something to Britten’s Lachrymae, maybe, or to the elegiac Vaughan Williams of the Flos Campi world — English models transplanted to Baltic soil, and none the worse for it. Kerem doesn’t oversell the pathos; the piece just sits there, unresolved, refusing you the comfort of a cadence that means anything.

The String Sextet, the longest work on the disc at nearly half an hour, asks the most patience and rewards it unevenly — gorgeous in its slow movement, a little discursive in its outer ones, the Tallinn Ensemble navigating the thicker contrapuntal passages with real address even where Kerem’s structural argument loosens. This is chamber music that wants to be orchestral; you can hear the symphonist itching to break out of six string parts.

Nobody else has recorded any of this, so there’s no comparative shelf to consult — which is exactly the point of a label like Toccata, and exactly why this disc matters more than its modest presentation might suggest. Kerem is a real discovery. I’d like to hear those first two symphonies now, whatever they’re called.