1958 photograph on Eduard Tubin, taken by Aarre Ekholm (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Every now and then I find myself encountering a previously-overlooked album, which interests me enough to catch up on lost time, so to speak. This was the case with The Early Years of Eduard Tubin, which was released by Orchid Classics almost exactly three month ago. Tubin was born on June 18, 1905, in Torila in Tartu County, located in the Governorate of Livonia, then part of the Russian Empire. His music education began at the Tartu Teacher’s College in 1920. He studied under the Estonian composer Heino Eller and would later be influenced by Zoltán Kodály, whom he met in 1938 during a visit to Hungary.
The album presents performances of two of Tubin’s major compositions. These are presented in chronological order, beginning with the four-movement Suite on Estonian Motifs, followed by his second symphony, given the title “Legendary.” There are also two additional tracks of solo piano preludes. Mihhail Gerts is both conductor of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and also pianist. The entire duration of the album is slightly longer than an hour.
Tubin’s approach to instrumentation definitely makes this album “worth the price of admission” (as P. T. Barnum would have put it). Awareness of his work was only recently revived with the creation of an annual Tubin Festival in 2021, held in Estonia in both Tartu and Tallinn. It will be interesting to see if Orchid Classics will continue with further releases of Tubin’s music, allowing listeners to assess his talents with more than an hour’s work of experience.
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