The Baltics Take Centre Stage: A New Wave of Classical Talent?

Two summers ago, I noticed a trend taking root on some high-profile opera stages. An awful lot of leading female singers had the distinctive-ending surnames (-aitė, -ytė or iūtė) that identified them as Lithuanian. 

The more I looked into it, the more I saw it—and it seemed not to be restricted to Lithuanian women. It appeared as though a tiny Northern European country of less than 3 million inhabitants was routinely stocking the world’s leading opera houses with talent. In 2024, the title roles in Tosca, Elektra and Madama Butterfly at the Royal Opera House in London were all taken by Lithuanian sopranos, among them the sensational Asmik Grigorian.

Riga, Latvia—Summer 2005

I wrote about the phenomena for this article in The Financial Times. While I was researching, singers including Edgaras Montvidas, Vida Miknevičiūtė and Aušrinė Stundytė spoke to me about growing up in a newly-free Lithuania in the 1990s, believing anything was possible. (In this production of Elektra from Hamburg, Stundytė sings the title role while the “senior” Lithuanian soprano, Violeta Urmana, sings Klytämnestra.)

My patch for reporting about classical music is the Nordic countries—Scandinavian plus Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. I know the music life of these countries intimately and I’d like to think I’ve got a decent understanding of them. But the Baltic Countries have always held a fascinating allure for me too. I visited Riga, the capital of Latvia, before I’d ever stepped foot in Scandinavia. It was on a choir tour in 2005, in which hundreds turned out to hear our concerts and sat in an attentive silence listening to them.

During that week in the summer of 2005, during periods between rehearsals and concerts I would walk over to the elegant opera house on the banks of the canal in Riga and wonder what was going on inside. There was a good chance that Andris Nelsons, Elīna Garanča and Kristine Opolais were at work in there.  

Those names have become emblematic of how Latvia and the Baltic Countries have come of age, musically, in the intervening two decades. Lithuanian and Latvian conductors and singers can be heard on the world’s most prestigious stages. Estonia has given the world its most listened-to living composer of concert music in Arvo Pärt and what is arguably the finest choir in the world in the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. 

If you were to ask me where the next great crop of performing talent is coming from, I would point unequivocally to the Baltic States. Just a few months ago, Estonia’s Academy of Music and Theatre was cited as one of the three finest institutions of its kind in Europe by a group of academics. You can see a fine performance from its orchestra, playing a concert of (nearly) all Estonian music, here.  

Singing One’s Way to Freedom

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that so many fine singers and choirs have emerged from the Baltic States. These are the countries that literally sang their way to freedom from Soviet rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 

What became known as The Singing Revolution—a peaceful protest involving the mass chanting of folksongs and hymns, which at one point involved an unbroken chain of human beings holding hands from Tallinn to Vilnius—had its roots in deep traditions. 

As Vida Miknevičiūtė told me for the FT article, “we [Lithuania] are a singing folk” who sang together “sometimes just as a method for staying alive.” Few remember the Soviet era with pleasure or affection, but the regime’s stern music education methods lingered long in these countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall, creating a perfect combination of creative impetus and technical capability. 

Then the boom happened. All three countries began their road to EU membership. They became nimble economies that emerged quickly from the financial crash of 2008. Riga became something of a “Paris of the North”—its feast of Art Nouveau architecture and grand boulevards perfect for a cheaper-than-Paris city break, as did the cutesy fairytale atmosphere of Vilnius. Estonia’s position as Europe’s start-up capital saw the creation of two brand new orchestras: the Estonian Festival Orchestra and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic.  

Concert halls have sprung up in the Latvian towns of Liepāja and Ventspils and a new opera house (one of three in the country) now graces the Lithuanian town of Klaipėda. Estonia has a new concert hall in Pärnu and is on the road to building a new opera house. Architecture firms are currently submitting plans for a competition for a new harbourside concert hall in Kaunas, Lithuania.

“Music Life in Vilnius Has Never Been Richer”

Russia’s war in Ukraine has had devastating consequences, the overwhelming majority of which have been felt by Ukrainians. But in the Baltic States, the conflict and Russia’s continued provocation of the three nations has also triggered countless traumas from the Soviet era, scars which almost every family in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania bear. As Edgaras Montvidas put it to me in 2024: “We are living next to the Volcano.”

Nothing good comes from war, but this Eastern European tragedy has delivered a groundswell in national pride that is being experienced across Ukraine and the Baltic States. That has undeniably had an effect on creativity and has reaffirmed ideas of what the countries hold dear, including the very expressive freedoms that were banned by the Soviets (bans that were frequently flouted, in the Baltic Countries at least). Music in the Baltic region has not stopped blossoming. If anything, it is thriving even more.

This summer, for an article in a Danish magazine, I investigated just what the new geopolitical reality on the Russian border means for musicians in the Baltic Countries. The conductor and composer Gediminas Gelgotas told me that music life in Vilnius has never been richer. “We have seen a doubling-down on who we are and what we do,” said the Estonian composer Jonas Tarm. The Latvian pianist Andrejs Osokins told me how his students are more interested than ever in playing Latvian music, and how the strife his nation is experiencing has inspired composers to write. 

One question I asked all the Baltic musicians I spoke to was whether comparisons can be drawn with the great blossoming of art and music in the Finland of the late 1800s and early 1900s—a Finland struggling with Russian aggression. Would we have the great works of Sibelius, without that struggle? 

Nobody could really answer that question in the affirmative. Some musicians poured cold water on the question’s inherent assumption, with the self-evident truth that war is good for nobody and nothing. These people have seen friends and colleagues die. To talk of a renaissance in the performing arts in Eastern Europe while Ukrainian musicians are fighting at the front seems crass. 

A New Generation Rising

There is something about the very particular sort of pride that you experience in the Baltic States—a humble sort of pride—that finds its voice in musical and artistic expression, and is doing so right now. Listening to Estonian Festival Orchestra, you are struck by the hunger of its young musicians and the sense of their unstoppable will to use music to break out into the world. 

This is what Montvidas, Miknevičiūtė and Stundyte spoke to me about in 2024. I sense it’s stronger than ever. You might conclude that it will only result in more exceptional talent emerging from the Baltic Countries. 

You’ve heard of the Lithuanian conductors Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and possible Giedrė Šlekytė. You’ve heard of the Lithuanian singers Asmik Grigorian and Justina Gringytė. Now check out soprano Aistė Pilibavičiūtė, conductor Izabelė Jankauskaitė and composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. 

From Latvia, you’ve heard (perhaps) of Andris Poga and Marina Rebeka. Now keep an eye on conductor Aivis Greters, violinist Daniil Bulayev and pianist Daumants Liepiņš. And from Estonia, you’ve heard of the Järvi dynasty, now keep an eye on conductor Kristiina Poska, violinist Hans Christian Aavik and composer Tatjana Kozlova-Johannes. And please, tell me about the fine Baltic artists I’ve forgotten or are yet to hear! 

I see no complacency in Baltic musicians, from those brilliant string quartets you encounter busking on the streets of Tallinn to the exceptional ranks of female conductors from the region who are determined to re-write the story of their profession. But I also hear so much commitment, joy and authenticity in the music they play and write, that it makes me strangely optimistic about the countries themselves. 

Music offered the citizens of the Baltic States the chance for freedom in the 1990s. There is no way the next generation is going to pass-up the chance to let music transform their lives all over again.