Sumera Lepo Sumera

Lepo Sumera (8 May 1950 – 2 June 2000) was one of the most striking personalities in contemporary Estonian music. He was considered the greatest living symphonist in Estonia, and a pioneer in electro-acoustic music. He was one of the central figures in the cultural life of Estonia. In the times of the country’s re-awakening in the late 1980s he belonged to the influential group of Estonian intellectuals generating ideas and strategies for social and political changes. In 1989-1992 he served as Estonia’s Minister of Culture. In 1993 he was elected the chairman of Estonian Composers’ Union by his colleagues; re-elected twice, he hold the post until June 2000 when he died from a heart failure. Lepo Sumera studied composition with Veljo Tormis at Tallinn Music High School and, from 1968, with the renowned Professor Heino Eller at the Estonian Academy of Music. After Prof. Eller’s death (1970) he studied with Heino Jürisalu, graduating 1973. He took post-graduate studies at Moscow Conservatory 1979-1982. Sumera worked as recording engineer and producer at Estonian Radio in his youth. He began teaching composition at the Estonian Academy of Music in 1978 and was appointed a professor in 1993. He was one of the founders of the studio of electronic music at the Music Academy and worked as its first director in 1995-1999. He also lectured in the Summer Courses of New Music in Darmstadt (1988, 1989) and in Musikhochschule in Karlsruhe (1992). Works by Lepo Sumera have been performed in majority of the European countries, in the USA, Canada and Australia, and on Cuba. He took part in the festival ‘Composer-to- Composer’ in Telluride, Colorado (1988). In 1989 he was composer-in-residence at the festival New Beginnings in Glasgow and, in 1993, special guest at the Sydney Spring Festival of new music and the Norrtälje (Sweden) Chamber Music Festival.

He was awarded numerous annual music prizes and four state prizes in Estonia, and a prize for the best film music score at the international festival of animation films in Espinho (Portugal). His Fifth Symphony (1995) was chosen the 1st recommended work at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris in 1996. Sumera’s musical language demonstrates his individual approach to contemporary composition techniques. He preferred unorthodox – blending or contrasting – use of them (similar approach appeared later in works of his younger colleague, Erkki-Sven Tüür). Among Estonian composers and musicians, he was always one of the persons best informed in contemporary music. There is no reason to speak about the ‘iron curtain’ (which, in fact, functioned properly only until the middle 1950s) in connection with Sumera’s music, albeit the history of rising his ‘quasi-minimalist’ works written between 1981 and 1986 has suggested the idea to some western critics. It is true that American minimalism was unknown in Estonia until 1983 and Sumera learned his repetition technique from the archaic Estonian ‘runo’ song. But minimalism was noticed relatively late also in the West-European countries, in the Scandinavian countries it had been ‘discovered’ only a few years earlier than in Estonia.

As for Sumera’s works of that period, his treatment of overall form differs completely from the intentionally static forms of American minimalists. The symphony orchestra was his favourite medium. His symphonic works display an imaginative use of orchestral colours and remarkable skill in creating large form arches. His list of works includes two ballets – Anselm’s Story (libretto by Mai Murdmaa after E.T.A. Hoffmann) and The Lizard (Andrei Petrov after Alexander Volodin, 1987/93) –, six symphonies (1981-2000), a Piano Concerto (1989/93), Cello Concerto (1998/1999), and Concerto Grosso (2000) with three solo instruments (soprano saxophone, percussion, and piano).