Even a decade and more after the fall of Communism, one regularly hears sorry tales of the difficulties faced by the countries of the east as they adapt to a more liberal order: Russian health-care in meltdown, the Romanian economy struggling, St Petersburg pumping untreated sewage into the Baltic, Belarus still in the grip of a Stalinist despot …. In the circumstances, contemporary music in the Baltics seems to be in remarkably good health, with two longstanding festivals in Estonia, another in Lithuania and a new event emerging in Latvia all providing encouraging testimony of the vigour of the new-music scene in the three republics.