Gallery: Tallinn Music Week in pictures

Tallinn Music Week, a new music and city festival that took place from 4-8 May in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, and border town Narva, hosted almost 200 performers from 28 countries and attracted over 17,000 visitors; Andrea Forlani captured some of the moments for Estonian World.

The annual new music festival and conference, running since 2009, this time hosted 192 artists from 28 countries and 974 music and culture industry professionals from all over the world. The event drew over 17,000 visits – over 10,000 in Tallinn and almost 7,000 in Narva, a town of 55,000 mainly Russian-speaking people that sits at the Estonian-Russian border.

A Ukrainian pop star, Ivan Dorn, opened the festival in Tallinn’s Telliskivi Creative City. “Let us dance, in defiance of the enemy. We need to rejoice a little. They expect us to sink into our anxiety, sadness and grief, but we won’t give in,” he later told the Estonian Public Broadcasting’s evening news programme.

Ivan Dorn performing at the Tallinn Music Week’s opening concert. Photo by Andrea Forlani.

Helen Sildna, the festival’s founder, said the “desire for optimism, the desire for spending time together – dancing, talking, celebrating – was felt strongly” at the events.

“The strongest manifestation of ‘togetherness’ was felt at the Russian Orthodox Church in Narva, at the ‘Give Us Peace’ concert of Arvo Pärt’s music performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tõnu Kaljuste. Standing there, at the border of the EU, together with people from around the world, as well as the local community, made us feel as if for a second the gravitation point of the world was right there, in our joint call for peace,” she said in a statement.