The Tartu student mixed choir from Tartu, Estonia, performed a program that highlighted contemporary Estonian composers and the country’s century-old song-festival tradition, and the choir’s director described how mass singing factored into Estonia’s push for independence.

Kilike Yosting, conductor of the Tartu student mixed choir, introduced pieces by composers she named as Adolf Bernd, Bernd Oseberg, Rasmus Pur and Maureen Calcutt, among others. She described one text as exploring “what is to be human” and introduced a work she said was written for a friend “who was having a difficult time in her life.” The choir’s accompanist on several items was identified as Miriam Marta; Krista conducted a piece later in the program.

Yosting provided context for Estonia’s song-festival tradition, saying the national song festival occurs roughly every five years and at one point involved “10,000 of mixed choir singers” with a combined choir of about 30,000 and an audience of about 70,000; she said the nation’s population is about 1,300,000. She said the mass singing played a role in Estonia’s independence movement: “this singing, like, this big singing together also is what, in a way in a in a way, we sang ourselves free, from the Soviet Union.”

The program included a piece by Mina Grama inspired by wedding songs and described as a dance, and a work by a composer Yosting identified as Maureen Calcutt. Yosting noted Estonia’s large-scale song and dance festivals as a cultural practice that helped restore national symbols, including the blue-black-white flag, after Soviet-era bans.

The remarks mixed program notes about composers and texts with cultural and historical context; the choir’s descriptions were presented as commentary accompanying their performance rather than as a formal historical lecture.