Tui Hirv
b. May 5, 1984 TallinnTui Hirv is a chamber and choral singer specializing mainly in new music. Her focus is on 19th–20th-century chamber music. The lyrics of the songs and their musical mediation are very important to her. In addition, she is also a musicologist and writer.
Hirv´s musical education commenced at Nõmme Music School where she studied piano. Her career as a professional musician began as part of the girls' choir Ellerhein (1996–2002), with whom she performed and recorded large-scale vocal-symphonic works in collaboration with ERSO and RAM under the direction of Tõnu Kaljuste, Andres Mustonen, Paavo Järvi, Anu Tali and others. She continued her studies at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, majoring in singing with Martti Pelo and later with Leili Tammeli, from which she graduated in 2007. Hirv has also studied singing with Anu Aimla and Marta Hrafnsdóttir. In 2009, Hirv completed her master's degree in musicology at EMTA, where the topic of her thesis was Chamber singing concerts in Tallinn in the years 1987–2007 and their reception, supervisor Prof. Urve Lippus.
From 2008–2009, Hirv was a member of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (conductors Daniel Reuss, Tõnu Kaljuste, Paul Hillier, etc.), in 2011–2013 she sang early music in the ensemble Vox Clamantis (conductor Jaan-Eik Tulve). With these collectives, Hirv has performed at festivals and tours around the world and recorded choral music for the record companies ECM and Harmonia Mundi. She has collaborated with several classical and contemporary music ensembles (Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, Resonabilis, Heinavanker, Hortus Musicus, etc.) and has premiered new works by several contemporary composers (Pärt, Tulve, Grigorjeva, Lill, Pálsson, Viira, Veeroos). In October 2012, Arvo Pärt's album Adam's Lament was released by ECM New Series, where Tui Hirv sings the solo part in "L'Abbé Agathon" with EPCC and TCO under the direction of Tõnu Kaljuste. The recording won a 2014 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance. Tui Hirv has also participated in opera and musical productions, was involved with classical and modern dance, and has written many texts about music.
Tui's collaboration with her composer husband Páll Ragnar Pálsson has been particularly fruitful, resulting in more than ten works for Tui as a soloist and for ensembles of various scales. In 2019, Páll Ragnar Pálsson's album Atonement was recorded together with the Caput Ensemble, which was released by the US record company Sono Luminus. Tui's performance was nominated for the German Opus Klassik award in the solo song category.
Since 2013, Hirv has lived in Iceland, where she retrained as a kindergarten teacher. She has written the book My Reykjavík (2015) about her experiences living there and has published countless articles on culture and social issues in Estonian magazines. As a musicologist, she has participated in the work of the jury of the Icelandic Music Awards, organized the archive of the composer Atli Heimir Sveinsson, taught music history at the Icelandic Academy of Arts, organized the church music festival in Skálholt.
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