They still exist, the festivals without the obligatory accompanying music of MeToo complaints, attacks by theory-bound art philistines on high culture and fruitless discussions about sponsors, which are currently fashionable in Western Europe.
For example, in the small town of Haapsalu on the Estonian Baltic Sea coast, where cats stalk the empty streets at eleven o'clock in the evening and a cool breeze makes you forget the heat.
In the old spa town, where Peter Tchaikovsky once spent a summer, a small but fine festival for early music has been taking place since 1994, which attracts enthusiastic listeners from far beyond the country's borders.
The lack of zeitgeist excitement is probably due to the fact that the band isn't involved with the music business and, being within range of Russian short-range missiles, knows that there are more important issues than wokeness.
People are surprisingly relaxed about the existence of a violent neighbor on their doorstep, and membership in NATO provides security.
For some, however, the fears stirred up by Russian propaganda are getting hold of them.
A friendly gentleman from an Estonian-Russian family says in an interview what German friends of peace also say: the West is provoking a nuclear war in the Ukraine, and an early peace is in the interest of the population.
Incidentally, the West also has its narratives and bans on speaking.
In a country with a large Russian-speaking minority, such differences of opinion are commonplace, but they seem to be able to deal with them.
At the festival in Haapsalu they played no part.
The music was the focus, but sometimes it unexpectedly began to speak clearly.
In the final concert with the English vocal ensemble Tenebrae Consort, the Lamentations of Jeremiah by the Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis about the devastated city of Jerusalem involuntarily made us think of current events.
The hall of the thirteenth-century fortress-like cathedral was the ideal resonance space for the powerful composition, which was brought to maximum effect with only five soloists.
From the very beginning, the festival aimed to provide a platform for historical performance practice in Estonia.
With its combination of research and high standards of interpretation, it has now developed into a center for early music with international connections.
Founder, artistic director and also conductor is Toomas Siitan, musicologist and historian at the Tallinn Academy of Music.
Responsible for the management is the harpsichordist Saale Fischer, who commutes between Germany and Estonia and has just published a doctoral thesis on the organization of time in baroque music.
The budget of seventy thousand euros, around three quarters of which is public money, requires a lot of personal activity and self-exploitation.
The programs range from Gregorian chant to Baroque with a glimpse of the early Classic period.
Guest ensembles are responsible for medieval music, while local forces devote themselves primarily to the baroque, above all the fabulous choir and most of the instrumentalists.
They play historical instruments, the strings with gut strings and in the partially tempered Vallotti tuning suitable for the High Baroque.
The opening concert with a pure Bach program under Siitan's direction showed what top performances the semi-professional choir, consisting largely of university members, and the orchestra, carefully rehearsed by the Finnish concertmaster Aira Maria Lehtipuu, are capable of.
The communicative attitude that permeates all of Bach's oeuvre is immediately reflected in Haapsalu's strong community-building power.
With the first chords, the threefold call of the motet “Komm, Jesu, komm”, work, performers and audience were instantly one.
The enthusiasm with which the choir plunged into the polyphonic waves was contagious.
This was not at the expense of structural clarity,
Another in-house production was the concert with the Ensemble Floridante with German arias by Handel based on texts by Brockes, with French clavecin music played by the ubiquitous Saale Fischer, and with quartets by Telemann: imaginative pieces characterized by concertante joy of playing.
The name Johann Sebastian Bach stood for another highlight of the festival, the performance of the Goldberg Variations.
With his highly concentrated playing style, the French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau made it a unique listening adventure lasting over an hour and a half.
The thematic and stylistic range of the program was reflected in two concerts with works by the Viennese classics.
The Concerto Copenhagen, which is currently touring through Europe, unleashed a whirlwind with audience appeal with three symphonies by Joseph Haydn from the Sturm und Drang period, and three historically closely related works by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were heard in one concert.
The interpreters were the four young musicians of the M4GNET string quartet from Tallinn, which with its musically gripping,
recommended the game as a forthcoming quartet formation that illuminates the details finely.
The performance of the young Anna-Liisa Eller was similarly forward-looking: With her virtuoso playing on the kantel – a zither, known in Finnish as the antele – she proved the absolute suitability of this folk instrument for Baroque music.
Obviously, Estonia is still good for some musical surprises.