For the first time in decades, I went to a song festival. It’s an Estonian tradition going back almost 150 years, and an amazing experience. This year’s event was not the “full” festival but the youth festival, with a particular focus on young composers, conductors and performers. (The full one is a bit larger.) Even so, there was a choir of 10,000+ singers and 50,000 people in the audience. Awe-inspiring, quite literally.

We were a bit late to the venue so we ended up sitting further back that I had hoped, among the trees at the top of the slope, and didn’t quite get the full impact of the ten thousand voices. So we’ll have to attend the next one again and be there earlier, to get an even better experience.

I have vague, distant memories of attending the festival as a small child. Somewhat more strongly I remember the extraordinary (in all senses of the word) “Song of Estonia” festival in 1988, attended according to some claims by a quarter of the population of Estonia. I was a callow child, uninterested in current affairs, but even I could feel history being made on that day.