That's a real national value."Jarvi, meanwhile, draws a parallel between Estonia's "Singing Revolution" and Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution". Now, in an open society, the arts are developing in another way: artists find they are responsible to quite different criteria. Nobody in the West can understand the absurdity we had to live with in Soviet times. For one thing, we couldn't invite foreign artists: all that was controlled from Moscow.

I'm still keen on remaining open to all possibilities as a way towards a personal style: I enjoy moving between simpler, more tonal structures, and complex atonal passages, sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly, but consistently."With commissions coming in from all sides (David Geringas recently premiered his Cello Concerto in Lausanne), and his music recorded on several labels (ECM as well as EMI), Tuur has benefited from Estonian music's higher visibility in the West: "If economic structures change, then so does cultural life. So in the early 1980s I was influenced by Ligeti and Xenakis as well as by Reich and Glass. That was a good laboratory for a beginning composer, to have an idea one evening, and take it into rehearsal the next day, to test how it really worked. In any case, Estonian musical life has always looked westwards, even during the Soviet era."It's a point echoed by Tuur: "My first musical experience was with a group I set up in 1979, In Spe, playing what I called 'chamber rock'. Arvo Part is Estonian, but to call his music Nordic is misleading, nor should we look for anything particularly Estonian in his music I hear it simply as Arvo Part Yet Estonia has always had a strong musical culture. Perhaps it's because a certain cultural heritage was carried over from the Germans, the Swedes, the Danes, the Russians.

In terms of music, it helps that there are so many Nordic artists making a name for themselves: composers, conductors, performers - they command attention. Now they're making a strong effort to have a more European, a more international presence. At best they're distant provinces: I'm still asked if there is ever any summer there. One of the first pieces he conducted with them was Tuur's Zeitraum (the closing item on his new CD) and there is a liberal scattering of Nordic composers in his repertoire: his CBSO concert tomorrow night includes pieces by Nielsen, Berwald and Stenhammar. It was also the first time he'd ever worked with an orchestra in Estonian "It was an important moment for me I felt anxious and nervous.

These musicians had known me since I was five - I grew up watching them rehearse with my father. But the orchestra was very good, and I felt good, physically and mentally. That trip was the first of what I hope will be frequent visits there."More recently, Jarvi took up the post of principal guest conductor with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Now, though, a younger generation has emerged, and there is a variety of different styles, so we can't say that the Part style dominates."Shortly after recording the CD last year with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic (of which he is principal guest conductor), Paavo Jarvi returned to Estonia to conduct an Estonian orchestra for the very first time. Part certainly prepared the way for contemporary Estonian music, and in the late 1970s his magnificent Tabula rasa influenced many of us, and I include myself. So you might treat the music on this CD as the output of one 'school'.