The fierce music of Estonia, Latvia

His concentration on folk-based choral works sat well with the anti-formalist, anti-elitist Soviet authorities. In fact, he was commissioned to write major works for song festivals as well as the 1980 Moscow Olympics (whose yachting events were in Tallinn). Both pieces became rallying points for what is often called "the singing revolution": National solidarity arising from singing events aided Estonian independence when the Soviet regime began to totter in the late 1980s.

Tormis modestly says punk rock played a larger role in the revolution. He also claims his imaginative vocal writing - with chromatic clusters and simultaneous events that include chanting, shouting, and sighing - is just a matter of folk songs speaking through him. Conductor Kaljuste doesn't buy that, and attributes Tormis' stance to a time "when declarations were popular" and needed for survival.

In effect, Tormis created a template for a modern, personal compositional voice - the ancient gives birth to the modern - in an era that didn't welcome such things. Some of the more raucous examples of his supposedly unmediated folk songs are barely organized street noise. It's angry stuff, dating (not coincidentally) from the Soviet '70s. "Well, naturally!" he says.

Sacred music also has a rebellious element: Though it wasn't exactly banned under Soviet rule, Pärt's unrelenting devotion to religious texts forced him to emigrate to Vienna in the 1970s. In post-Soviet Riga, people attended church if only to exercise their newfound freedom. Esenvalds comes by his sacred choral works honestly - he's a devout Baptist - and though his music has intense chord structures suggesting electronic music, he is one of many who give Baltic music a contemplative aura.

"With a silent voice, you can say more than with shouting," he said. "You can show more details, more atmosphere, more a sense of bigger space."

The quietude is contagious even among street musicians. In one of Tallinn's underpass tunnels, the young Argentine violinist Sebastian Wesman plays his own works, having been drawn to the Baltics two years ago, inspired by the selfless simplicity of Arvo Pärt.

"I used to play in secure, closed places. But when I'm here, I enter a state of defenselessness," he said. "Not understanding the [Estonian] language means that I'm more concentrated on composing as a form of communication. My compositions changed radically here."

His Lagrimas weaves simple melodies into a haunting, solitary dance, like the final movement of Pärt's Symphony No. 4, which is so recent Wesman couldn't have heard it before writing his own.

Is it something in the air?