It isn’t often that one gets to travel with the president of the United States. But there we were, on September 3, 2014, together in Tallinn, Estonia. Well, we were not actually ‘together’ but we were in the same city on the same day, and indeed within a few feet of each other in the old city. And if the truth be told, I was sightseeing and he was declaring NATO’s solidarity with Estonia should Valdimir Putin’s megalomania decide that it was time to gobble up the Baltic states once more.
It was a sobering occasion. Tallinn is a beautiful old city with a proud history and the fact is that it is virtually indefensible even by NATO. Estonia is a country of little more than a million people with no military strength to speak of, and it has the geographical misfortune to be on Russia’s border.
My wife Marita and I were in Tallinn tracking down her family history. She was born in Finland but her roots can be traced back to Estonia. The Cathedral of St. Mary or the Dome Church, is the oldest church in Tallinn. Its walls are covered with coats of arms of centuries-old noble families. Among them was the coat of arms for her family: von Stackelberg.
Later on in the trip we caught up with some of Marita’s living relatives in Helsinki. Over a feast of herring, meatballs, lingonberries, cloudberries, five different kinds of bread, and wine and all the trimmings, we swapped stories and got up to date on politics and the arts. Marita’s cousin Pirjo Honkasalo is one of Finland’s foremost film directors – her latest film “Concrete Night” was shown at TIFF last year – and Pirjo’s partner Pirkko Saisio is a leading playwright and screenwriter. Also joining us was Pirkko’s daughter Elsa, a well-known Finnish actress.
The Finns know all about Russia and its aggressive tendencies. On the whole they have given as good as they got; nonetheless, Finns today are worried about Russia once again and are apprehensive about what Putin may have in store for them.
We visited Russia too, stopping for three days in St. Petersburg. The current tensions have not yet reduced the flow of tourists. There were half a dozen giant cruise ships in port during our visit and the halls of the Hermitage teemed with visitors. I had been to the Hermitage once before but I was struck again by the depth and breadth of the collection. The Hermitage has dozens of the most famous Rembrandts and a vast collection of works by the French Impressionists. Amid all this greatness a thought crossed my mind: where are the great Russian painters? But then, Catherine the Great who founded the museum in 1764, took her standards of great art from Europe generally, and from France and Holland in particular.
For Marita and myself this trip was not primarily about music but we encountered plenty of it just the same. In Russia, for example, we attended an evening of Russian folk music and dance, a typical event for cruise ship passengers. In fact, it was virtually the same program I had heard at Massey Hall in Toronto in 1957 – 57 years ago. At the time, it was billed as the Red Army Chorus and it was a thrilling evening of male choral singing, dancing by incredibly well-disciplined men and women and virtuoso playing by an orchestra of about 30 players. Chorus and orchestra members were dressed in Soviet Army uniforms complete with huge hats. In St. Petersburg in 2014 the presentation was almost exactly the same except it wasn’t billed as the ‘Red Army Chorus.’ One might have expected to see and hear a tired old relic of better days, but the performances were just as well-disciplined and just as energetic as years ago. As in 1957, so in 2014, the concert finished with “Kalinka” and now as then, it brought the audience to its feet. And let’s not forget the whistling. At both concerts several members of the chorus stepped forward and produced the loudest and most musical whistling I have ever heard.
There was music too on board our ship. Jazz clarinetist Bob Wilber is now 86 years old and moving a little slower than he used to in his prime, but he can still toss off licks reminiscent of the Big Band Era. Together with his wife, jazz singer Pug Horton, Wilber fronted the house band on board and they all demonstrated that good jazz is alive and well.
Finally, the best concert I heard in the past two weeks was also given on board our ship, the Seven Seas Voyager. Many of our fellow passengers were part of a tour organized by Public Television. Gwen Ifill, anchor of the PBS “Newshour” and “Washington Week in Review” gave several talks, and broadway star Christine Andreas held the audience in the palm of her hand with performances of extraordinary expressiveness. Performers of the caliber of Barbra Streisand have made Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” a classic art song, but Andreas’ performance was the equal of any of them.
Last but not least, I was touched to see a wonderful statue of Hans Christian Lumbye (1810-1874) in the park at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. Lumbye was known as “The Strauss of the North” and with good reason; his waltzes and dance pieces for orchestra deserve to be much better known.
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