Come and witness how the Song Festival Arch transforms into a spectacular canvas

Tickets are available for the concert on Saturday

While tickets for the Sunday Grand Concert of the XXVIII Song Celebration “Iseoma” /Kinship/ are sold out, over 13,000 tickets are still available for the Opening Concert on Saturday. This year, the Opening Concert focuses on dialects, with stunning visuals projected onto the Song Festival Arch that blend the onstage music and text into a cohesive artistic whole.

The Opening Concert makes a symbolic journey through Estonia, introducing various dialect regions and giving a platform to both classical and contemporary composers. According to the artistic director of the Song Celebration, Heli Jürgenson, the Opening Concert highlights the richness of the Estonian language, the playfulness of dialects, and their unique sound.
“This is a tribute to the diversity of our mother tongue – we are all different, yet together we form one nation. The concert title ‘Iseoma’ emphasizes this unity in diversity,” says Jürgenson.

The concert will feature select choirs performing with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. These select choirs are among the strongest in the country; they have expressed a desire to perform at the Opening Concert and have therefore taken on a slightly more demanding repertoire.

In addition to music and text, this year’s Opening Concert will be enhanced by visuals created by animation artist Sander Joone and director Mikk Jürjens. The animations will be projected onto the Song Festival Arch during the second half of the concert, when it will be darker outside.
“What Joone and Jürjens have created is truly beautiful and adds another dimension to the concert. The idea of the arch as a canvas is very appealing, but in the light of July it’s also a bit risky. Therefore, the effectiveness of the visuals depends a great deal on the weather and lighting,” said Ave Sopp, music editor of the Song and Dance Celebration Foundation.

The Opening Concert concludes with Rein Rannap’s cantata “Beautiful Land” (Ilus maa), composed in 1982 using texts from Hando Runnel’s poetry collection “The Purple of Red Evenings” (Punaste õhtute purpur).
“Rannap himself has said that he has reinterpreted the piece in a completely new way and that the harmonic language is entirely different. But the feeling it evokes in the singers remains the same – ‘Beautiful Land’ embraces the singers like a cradle,” said Sopp.