Alo Mattiisen’s typewriter concerto returns after more than 30 years

Alo Mattiisen’s “Typewriter Concerto in D” will be performed on October 25 at Tallinn’s Mustpeade House as part of an Estonian Sinfonietta concert, ERR reports.

The concerto’s manuscript had been kept on a museum shelf for more than 30 years. A score has now been prepared from it, raising further unanswered questions because there is no one left to ask about the work, the organisers said.

The piece won the best composition award from the expert council of the Tartu Popular Music Days in 1984. Though humorous at first glance, its use of a typewriter as a solo instrument was more than a musical experiment: it carried social criticism and symbolic meaning at the time.

During the Soviet era, ownership of typewriters was subject to strict state control because they made it easier to reproduce texts. The instrument’s rhythmic sound thus became a symbol of freedom, speaking the truth and protesting beyond the system.

The concert’s title work, Eino Tamberg’s “Concerto grosso,” features the saxophone as one of its solo instruments. In the post-war period and early Cold War, the Soviet regime opposed Western culture, particularly jazz and the saxophone. Tamberg’s work proved highly popular and won a gold medal at the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957. It was performed in both Eastern and Western Europe.

Tamberg recalled that he had not originally intended to write a concerto grosso. He wanted to write a concerto and chose a wind ensemble because the Estonian Radio Symphony Orchestra had many skilled wind players at the time. He said the title “Concerto for five wind instruments, piano, percussion and strings” seemed too long, and he then remembered that works of this kind had once been called concerto grossos.