The Estonian violinist Mihkel Kerem (born in Tallinn in 1981) is familiar as a performer in Britain as well as at home.

He is also a prolific composer, with over one hundred works to his credit, three symphonies among them.

The three-movement Third Symphony (2003) and the Lamento for viola and strings (2008–9) lie downstream from Shostakovich and Boris Tishchenko, and were inspired by the idea of the struggle of the individual voice against oppressive ideology.

The String Sextet (2004), cast in a single half-hour span, has its musical starting-point and initial poetic impulse in Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, and was intended to reflect a sleepless night before the action of the Dehmel poem that inspired Schoenberg; it also manifests the polyphonic lyricism of Strauss’ Metamorphosen.