The 11-day festival opened with Claudio Monteverdi's (1567-1643) opera L'Orfeo (1607), written nearly 400 years ago and, coming as it did in the transitional phase between renaissance and baroque periods of music, one of the first ever operas.

Following its premiere, L'Orfeo, featuring musicians playing period instruments, also gets a second performance Friday evening.

Conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, the festival's artistic director, said this year's event offers many new features.

Among other things, Finnish composer Olli Kortekangas' chamber opera  Ende und Beginn (2021) is getting its Estonian premiere even ahead of its Finnish one.

Kaljuste told "Aktuaalne kaamera": "First of all, city residents and visitors will be able to get a sense of what one of the world's first operas was like."

"Monteverdi had never been performed in Estonia before. They will also experience what is considered to be Estonia's most beautiful opera," Kaljuste went on, referring to Eino Tamberg's (1930-2010) Cyrano de Bergerac (1974).

"Then we will conclude with the Pirita Mass," Kaljuste added.

"The Pirita Mass was written specifically for the Pirita convent. It started as a single-voiced piece, then instruments were added, and then finally I commissioned Margo Kõlar to create a version with an orchestra. So this is an Estonian-language Mass intended for the worship services of the nuns at the Pirita convent," he continued.

"But before that, we will perform [Arthur] Honegger's La Danse des morts. So people walking through the cemetery to the church can contemplate the connections before and after the performance of this piece, which was written just before World War Two," Kaljuste said.

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