DAY 8 - 13 JULY Festival Free Day!

We wake to a beautiful day for our trip to a Kurgja Farmhouse Museum.

After a bus ride through the countryside beyond Pärnu, we arrive to greetings from our wonderful guide Naite, a Ukrainian woman who speaks English very well as her fifth language. The farm is lovely, with dozens of well-preserved buildings, a small museum detailing the life and work of Carl R. Jakobson and the National Awakening in Estonia, wonderful flowers, groves of birch trees, and nesting storks!

Everyone gets to help make rich black Estonian bread with an elderly baker woman, taste both everyday and special bread, and hear the story of the pig-shaped loaf saved by Estonian farming families for the first day that the animals returned to the fields. Naite gives us 8 loaves to take with us :)

We also learn how to make twisted yarn bracelets and hairties, as well as whittling animal toys from trees found on the farm.

Back to Pärnu for our lunch and AYS rehearsal, followed by free time – visits to the grocery store to find interesting things, walks to the beach, rest in the hotel room, etc. – until dinner and the evening concert.

The evening concert was great, as they have all been! All 3 Belgian choirs performed together tonight, the Estonian young women’s choir did some nice pieces with interesting movement, and the French choir performed a powerful, moving opera about a government plan in the 1800s to gather up all the orphans and children in poverty to “educate and train” them.

We had an impromptu rehearsal outside, working on the songs for our Open Sing duty tomorrow with the different OS conductors as they walked by. Singing through the streets on the way to our beds :)

Tomorrow, our evening VIP (very important performance) in the Concert Hall!!

DAY 5 - 10 JULY Pärnu, ESTONIA and the first full day of the Europa Cantat junior Festival!

Our first breakfast in Pärnu at the Georg Café next to Hommiku Hostel, cafeteria style with many options. Hannele, our wonderful guide/translator, meets us for the walk over to the Concert Hall for our first rehearsal with Maestro Kaljuste with both an adult and youth Estonian choir.

After a rigorous, interesting rehearsal, we go to the Festival food building for lunch – there will be lots of potatoes (and noodles), meat in sauce, and salads with lots of cabbage, with lots of unusual desserts to try. We rehearse in one of the side lounges in the Concert Hall and then break into groups to explore the Old Town shops and cafes (and ice cream vendors!).

The first Open Sing is great fun – two funny talented Estonian directors run the Open Sings with a different guest choir every day. We have been asked to do this on DAY 9. Today, we learned several songs from Estonia and one from South America (with dance moves).

The evening concert is a bit mind blowing, with great performances by the Estonian National Opera Boys Choir and Ellerhein Girls’ Choir. Our Singers are amazed by the young, featured boy soloist and also by the terrifying, otherworldly stage presence of the EGC – we won’t forget them for a very long time!

Hopefully, a better night’s sleep is in store – the weekend is over!

DAY 4 - 9 JULY Tallinn, ESTONIA and the first day of the 6th annual Europa Cantat junior Festival!

A very early start, eating breakfast and checking out of our hotel for a 7AM bus to the ferry terminal – the broad daylight helps ;)

All of our ferry tickets have our names on them (very cool to the Singers). We board the enormous Tallink Superstar! Some enjoy the deck, many enjoy a card game in the huge lounge or exploring the 5 floors of the ferry.

Arriving in ancient Tallinn is wonderful – we get to meet Aime Mark, our representative from the BaltoScandia tour company, in person at the terminal. Our guide Katrin is super, giving us a tour of the upper and lower Old Town and telling us very interesting stories about the towers Fat Margaret and Tall Herman! Helsinki is probably 500 years younger than Tallinn, so we see totally different sights and architecture. A GREAT view from the top of the highest hill looks out on the many red roofs of Old Town.

We also visit the famous Singing Festival grounds (also the site of the Singing Revolution in the 1980s), where 25,000 singers performed for over 90,000 audience members just last week. How cool is that?!?

Lunch is fun in lower Old Town, wandering in small groups through the old streets, trying delicious food, and enjoying/buying the interesting Estonian crafts and souvenirs.

Then a sleepy bus ride (with a brief rainstorm) south through the Estonian countryside to Pärnu for the 6^th annual Europa Cantat junior Festival, where we see several choruses walking in gaggles. Checking in at the Concert Hall, we get our passes, nametags, Open Sing songbooks, and programs – there’s the AYS name in print! We meet our cute, wonderful translator/companions Hannele and Eveliis – thank goodness we have them :)

Our communal soup dinner is followed by a fun Estonian choral and dance performance in the outside amphitheatre in Beach Park. 900 Singers are attending from Catalunya, other parts of Spain, France, Belgium, Estonia, and Taiwan!!

Our hotel is much more rustic than our Finnish one, fitting with the summer vacation town atmosphere, and is situated on the edge of Pärnu’s Old Town. It is also right next to a big late-night bar with live music (Linda Ronstadt’s Blue Bayou, as sung in Estonian by a man with an almost-Willie Nelson accent, anyone?) – we may be passing out earplugs to our Singers for the rest of the week! ;)

Tomorrow, our first Atelier to rehearse the Cyrillus Kreek Reekviem with conductor Tõnu Kaljuste!