This year's song festival was wonderful.
I took part myself with the mixed choir of the Raudtee Culture Society.
People keep asking me why I went to sing in a Tallinn choir. There are, after all, several very good choirs at work here at home. But a change that happened in my life a few years ago touches me in a way that is "beautiful and painful". 🙂 I simply had to change my surroundings.
Greetings to all of you who are and always will be my favourites.
Here is our choir, a very fine crowd with the finest conductor I know (Aivar Lestsinski).
Photo: Ulvi Gundlach
The song festival was wonderful.
That feeling cannot be put into words. You simply have to be there yourself.
I hope my pictures can convey at least a little of what I saw and heard.
The large picture is from the first evening of the song festival. Under the song arch are 22 thousand singers, and in front of us an audience of some 70 to 80 thousand people. We breathe as one, we sing as one, we feel together. We are touched...
The first evening of the song festival. That feeling cannot be put into words.
What else I liked very much indeed about this year's festival:
The whole structure of the song festival, from the past to the present, in the form of a story. Very interesting, cohesive, moving.
The repertoire included both new songs and old ones long dear to the people. While "Puudutus" and "Taandujad" seemed rather difficult at first in rehearsal, by today they have become something like favourites. Especially the song "Puudutus", which today, at the end of the festival, we sang again and again. We sang it the whole time it took for 22 thousand singers to come down off the stage. And the tune carried on outside the gate as well.
The little flights of thought presented by representatives of our people during the breaks in the singing were very sweet and true to life. I hope to find them later on the festival website or elsewhere in the media, so I can write them out for myself.
The organisation of catering for the participants was simply astonishing. Not that there was anything bad to be said about earlier years, but this year it was quite brilliant. A constant column marches in through the gate, no smaller than the parade. And no scrambling, no pushing and no queue. Greetings to the splendid young man we called the canteen reporter among ourselves.
The selection of craft products was very good. You can be sure that the criterion for getting a stall was not money but the product on offer.
The whole song and dance festival was very well promoted this year. Above all, praise is due to all those splendid videos spread online that convey and introduce our people's great event and tradition to the rest of the world so beautifully and so aptly.
