COMPOSERS: Vasks
LABELS: Wergo
ALBUM TITLE: Vasks
WORKS: Viatore; Musica Adventus; Cor Anglais Concerto
PERFORMER: Sinfonietta Riga/Normunds Sne (cor anglais)
CATALOGUE NO: WER 6705 2
Pēteris Vasks’s music is a beguiling mixture, poised somewhere on a tightrope between Sibelius and Arvo Pärt, with modal string writing that recalls Vaughan Williams and exotically inflected melody that hints at a Baltic Hovhanness. Whatever you might say about the spiritual value and meaning of his music – and personally I don’t find it quite as profound as Vasks’s most enthusiastic admirers claim – this much-praised Latvian’s mastery of the string-orchestra medium is patent, and the three pieces on this new release all exude beautiful and sometimes ravishing sounds. The 1998 Cor Anglais Concerto seems nearest to classic status, a piercingly evocative essay in elegiac pastoral with restrained folk elements, fully exploiting the rich, sombre tones of a solo instrument bafflingly unexploited by other composers. Normunds Šnē, here both soloist and conductor, released a previous recording of it (conducted by Krišs Rusmanis) on Conifer: this new version is slower, and better. Musica Adventus is an orchestration of Vasks’s Third String Quartet; the tone-poem Viatore (‘Traveller’) is presumably an arrangement of an identically-titled organ piece which I haven’t heard: it has the authentic Sibelian ‘journeying’ ostinatos and sense of the landscape emerging and fading in the half-light. Enthusiasts for this composer need not hesitate: it’s an excellently recorded and beautifully performed disc. Calum MacDonald