World Premiere of the Concert Performance “Raua kutsumine”

Veljo Tormis | Marianna Liik | Margus Kasterpalu

8 choirs · 150 singers from the Nordic and Baltic countries and Ukraine
Soloists: Kreete Jacobi (French horn), Iris Oja (voice and shamanic drum), percussionists

On the evening of July 31, the culmination of the Leigo Lake Music Festival will be the unique staged concert “The Summoning of Iron” — an incantatory large-scale work created especially for the festival.
The production is inspired by Veljo Tormis’s “Curse Upon Iron” (1972), based on the ninth rune of the Finnish national epic Kalevala, later adapted and expanded by poets Paul-Eerik Rummo and Jaan Kaplinski.
How did iron come into being — the material from which nearly all the world’s weapons are made? The primal iron was forged by the smith Ilmarinen from pure bog ore, and he made iron promise that it would not do harm. Yet during its tempering, serpent’s venom entered it, turning iron evil and causing it to break its word and cut into flesh. Thus iron entered the world — and here we are now…

And yet Tormis’s work is deeply pacifist. It warns that the unethical use of creation, and the evil hidden within it, will ultimately turn against its creator. The closing lines of “Curse Upon Iron” therefore become the starting point, possibility, and core of “The Summoning of Iron”:

We are of the same stock,
born of the same seed,
you from the earth, I from the earth,
both of us from the dark soil.
Upon the same land we live,
within the same land we shall meet,
there will be enough earth for us both.

If “The Summoning of Iron” asks how to take away iron’s destructive force, the answer is already present in Tormis: one must return to the beginning — “We are of the same stock, both of us from the dark soil.”
But for this, someone is needed who has sufficient power and knows the right words — someone who, when the world teeters on the edge of the abyss, does not hesitate:

In the name of earth and air,
in the name of fire and water,
I call,
hear my prayer.
Powers of birth and rebirth,
powers of peace and silence,
heal
my body and my mind.

Thus begins a shamanistic ritual led by the Wise Woman, embodied by Iris Oja, with words by Doris Kareva. From this emerges a multilingual invocation addressed to earth, water, fire, and air — to the forces of the cosmos themselves. It is a call that even iron cannot refuse. It returns to Ilmarinen’s forge and casts itself onto the anvil…
Fire burns and purifies, the universe reorders itself, so that the bog may once again find peace — when we return to meet “within the same earth.”
In addition to the words of “Curse Upon Iron,” “The Summoning of Iron” incorporates texts by Doris Kareva, Hasso Krull, and Uku Masing, woven into Marianna Liik’s composition together with the spirit of Veljo Tormis, the power of regilaul (runic song), and the traditions of multiple cultures.