It’ll Be Sing or Swim in Estonia : The Pacific Chorale Will Participate in the First-Ever, International Bridges of Song Festival

If there is a hell for people who hate to sing, it has to be Tallinn, Estonia, for the next few days.

To begin with, Estonia is known as “the singing country,” the Wales of the Eastern Bloc, where if you don’t sing you’re considered a bit of a flake. Now, imagine Tallinn, the capital, swarming with perhaps 15,000 people who have come to add their voices to the chorus.

For the conductor of the Pacific Chorale, John Alexander, that arrangement sounded more like heaven, and the perfect place to send his singers on a concert tour. So, after what Alexander describes as a three-year buildup, the Pacific Chorale heads today for the land where singing is elevated to a national pastime, and no one simply listens.

The chorale will be participating in the first-ever Bridges of Song Festival, an international outgrowth of a venerated tradition in Estonia. For many years, Estonians have gathered in Tallinn every five years or so for their national Song Festival, a meeting that typically attracted as many as 40,000 people, all of whom eventually sang in one gigantic massed chorus.

A choral conductor from Indianapolis named John Williams heard of the festival and decided that such a gathering of voices could become a potent force for international understanding if it were open to singers and choral organizations from other countries in the West, as well as other parts of the Soviet Union.

After several years of planning and organizing through his International Concert Agency for Peace and Goodwill, Williams’ vision is about to materialize. Hugh Davies, the general manager of ACFEA Tour Consultants, the firm that is arranging the Pacific Chorale’s trip, says there will be thousands of new faces, new music and new presentations in Tallinn this year.

For the first time, professional choirs are being invited to perform as part of the festival’s Oratorio Week, and the Pacific Chorale is the sole American professional choir represented. The chorale will sing four concerts and three separate repertoires during the first five days of July.

The chorale was to be accompanied at three of the concerts by the Scottish National Symphony Orchestra, but the orchestra and its management decided to cancel their tour plans during the height of the Persian Gulf War. The Estonian National Philharmonic has now been scheduled to work with the choir on such showpieces as Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” Herbert Howells’ “Hymnus Paradisi,” Aaron Copland’s “Suite of Old American Songs” and Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

The fourth concert will be an a cappella program with works by Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber, as well as a short collection of traditional American spirituals.

The chorale’s invitation to Tallinn was a result, said conductor Alexander, of groundwork he laid while on tour there with his Northridge Singers, a chamber choir from Cal State Northridge, where Alexander is head of the choral program. On that trip, said Alexander, he met with officials of the festival, distributed Pacific Chorale flyers and tapes and generally took to the stump for his professional singers.

Alexander also became an advocate of bringing the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir to the United States; last year, the group came to California to perform at the national convention of the American Choral Directors Assn. in Fresno.

By the middle of last year, the bond had become strong enough between Estonia and Alexander that his Pacific Chorale was invited to Tallinn with hotel and meal expenses paid (individual choir members pay their own air fares and incidental expenses).

The chorale is something of a hybrid for this tour. Of the approximately 125 singers participating, about two-thirds are Pacific regulars. The remainder is made up of Alexander’s Northridge Singers (who will continue on to sing in Lithuania, Poland and Berlin at the end of the Pacific Chorale tour) and members of his Valley Master Chorale, a community chorus. The blend, however, is solid: every member has sung under Alexander in various circumstances, and beyond that, many of the Northridge and Valley singers now, or have at one time, sung with the Pacific Chorale.

Another advantage: Most of the music to be performed on the Pacific Chorale tour has been sung during the chorale’s previous regular season, or in the recent past. The singers’ memories of the works are sharp and much rehearsal time can be spent fine-tuning rather than learning from scratch.

Still, rehearsals have been fast-paced and intensive. Since the beginning of June, they’ve been ratcheted up from one to two three-hour sessions a week--one on Monday nights in Santa Ana to accommodate the singers from Orange County, and one on Wednesday nights in Los Angeles to keep down the gas bills of the singers who live up there. A final daylong rehearsal was held Saturday in Santa Ana, complete with a lecture on how to pack an efficient suitcase.

Questions among chorale members still remain. Few have ever traveled to the Soviet Union and they are struggling to separate the myth from the reality. Tips from Davies have helped. Among the most salient:

* Expect the food to be substantial, hardly nouvelle cuisine.

* Expect to buy most goods with American dollars.

* Expect endless changes of plans (Davies joked that singers have referred to his company’s initials, ACFEA, as meaning All’s Changed; Forget Earlier Announcement).

* Expect to run into musical quirks here and there, such as a Yugoslav barbershop quartet.

* Don’t drink the tap water in Leningrad.

* Don’t become involved in a black market transaction.

* Don’t take photos out of airplane windows (one set of windows that glasnost has yet to open).

* Plan on a distinct lack of elbow room on the Tallinn-to-Leningrad train.

* Plan on being received well; singers in the Soviet Union have a certain cachet.

“I think going to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is an experience any American should have,” said Alexander, “and particularly now. This will be my fifth trip there and I learn more every time.”

That infatuation led Alexander and Davies to cast around for a place to perform a fifth concert, after the chorale’s work is done in Tallinn. The choices, said Davies, were narrowed down to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and Leningrad. Concert organizers in both cities said they would pay for the chorale’s lodging and meals. Overwhelmingly, though, the singers liked the idea of singing in a historic cathedral in Leningrad, and so Leningrad it was.

There were strong incentives. When the Pacific Chorale sings in Smolny Cathedral in Leningrad, it will mark the first performance by a professional choir in that cathedral and the first time the cathedral has covered the costs of any visiting choir, according to Davies. It also will be the only time on the tour that the chorale will perform excerpts from Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers,” sung in Russian, and that performance will mark the first time that piece, familiar and deeply venerated in the Soviet Union, has been sung in the cathedral by an American choir.

There may be one other first. Many chorale members, anticipating a Fourth of July in the Soviet Union, will be packing their baseball gloves for an inter-chorale softball game in a Tallinn park. The game may get ignored by the Estonians as eccentric, but “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch ought to draw a crowd.

Apparently, it’s that kind of town.