Liis Jürgens Whisperer. Sun Temple for timpani and string orchestra (2026, premiere): “For a long time, the working title of the piece was simply and abstractly ‘TIMP’. This story carried several other titles along the way, such as ‘Palimpsest’, ‘Space of Possibilities’, and ‘Doubles’. Ultimately, ‘Whisperer’ (Lausuja) and ‘Sun Temple’ remained.

In the first movement, the timpani soloist is the whisperer—a creator of their own reality. In the second movement, we hear a rhythm borrowed from the Sun Temple in Jaipur, played on the nagara (an Indian kettle drum and predecessor to the timpani) during morning sunrise rituals.

Even before traveling to India, I knew I was preparing to write for the timpani and had already met with the future soloist, Vambola Krigul. Encountering timpani-like instruments in India was thrilling; it felt like a sign or confirmation that I was on the right path. I decided to record a small audio memory on my phone to bring that impression to the audience, transposed for Western instruments. In that small, domed temple, the low sound of the large nagara resonated through the entire body, much like bass from a club speaker today.

Lately, I’ve had the impression of an unwritten rule in contemporary music: that regular rhythm and pure triads—unless they are very subtly hidden within the work—are taboo. Therefore, the music here flirts with that observation. From a compositional standpoint, the work relates the physical-improvisational world to the abstract-neutral-aleatoric one. As an aid for the aleatoric elements, the randomness service random.org was utilized.

The work was commissioned by Estonian Music Days and is dedicated to Vambola Krigul.”

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Maria Rostovtseva: “The Golden Egg (2026, premiere) draws its inspiration from the Dutch writer Tim Krabbé’s novella Het gouden ei (The Vanishing) and the film Spoorloos (The Vanishing), which was adapted from the book. At the center of my composition is the female protagonist’s dream of a golden egg and the meaning this image acquires in the context of the story’s ending.”
Once, as a little girl, she dreamed that she was locked inside a golden egg that flew through the universe. Everything was pitch-black; there were no stars at all. She would have to stay there forever, and she could not even die. There was only one hope: another golden egg was flying through space. If it collided with hers, both would be destroyed, and everything would be over. But the universe was so vast!
(Tim Krabbé, The Vanishing, translation Claire Nicolas White, Random House, 1993, pp. 13–14.)

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Emergence of Light is a concert-performance structured as an eight-part inner passage—less a narrative than a gradual unfolding of consciousness. The work brings together Liis Jürgens: Whisperer. Sun Temple, Maria Rostovtseva: The Golden Egg, and Astra Irene Susi: Emergence of Light into a single dramaturgical arc, where sound, text, and movement trace the fragile threshold between darkness and perception.

At its core, the performance is an inward journey: not toward resolution, but toward recognition. The recurring poetic fragments—by Ene Mihkelson, Hermann Hesse, Hando Runnel, Rein Raud, and Jaan Malin—do not illustrate events; they articulate states of being. Language dissolves into rhythm, repetition, and reflection, mirroring a mind attempting to grasp itself.

The eight scenes function as stations of this passage:

I Entrance / Birth
A boy soprano stands alone at the center. The voice emerges as if from stillness itself—“I go, I come, I remain”—a paradoxical state where movement and stasis coexist. The subject is not yet formed; it is adrift, carried by forces it cannot name.

II Search / Forest
Moving toward the violins, the voice enters a space of searching. The “forest” is not literal but perceptual: a density of direction without clarity. Identity begins to differentiate, yet remains unstable, suspended between inner impulse and external pull.

III The Other
An actor enters. The encounter with “the other” introduces reflection and doubling. As in Hesse’s image of the face in dark water, the self appears as something both familiar and estranged. There is no return—only continuation into the unknown.

IV Recognition
Near the violas, a moment of fragile awareness emerges. Recognition here is not resolution but confrontation: the realization that what is seen has always been there. Light flickers, but does not yet illuminate.

V Entity
The voice moves toward the actor’s space. Individual boundaries begin to blur. The “entity” is not a character but a state—something that exceeds the singular self, where voice, body, and sound merge into a shared field.

VI Preparation
The actor returns to the origin point. Language becomes more fragmented, elemental. Texts by Runnel, Raud, and Malin evoke desire, absence, and the persistence of a fragile inner flame. This is a threshold: something is about to change, though nothing external marks it.

VII Silence
With timpani and strings, sound approaches its limit. Silence is not emptiness but density—a space where perception sharpens. The boy soprano moves toward the edge, as if approaching disappearance or transformation.

VIII Light
Low resonance and humming fill the space. The voice returns toward the beginning, but not to the same place. Light does not arrive as an external force; it is revealed as something that has always been present—within the body, within sound, within perception itself.

Across the performance, Jürgens’ Whisperer. Sun Temple frames the act of creation as ritual and bodily resonance; Rostovtseva’s The Golden Egg reflects existential isolation and the longing for annihilation or connection; and Susi’s Emergence of Light binds these into a single experiential trajectory.

Rather than telling a story, Emergence of Light composes a state: a continuous movement between self and reflection, voice and silence, darkness and the possibility of seeing.