Sometimes I wonder whether we here in Britain can understand the creative work of East European peoples who have been persistently invaded, abused, repressed and occupied by foreign forces. True, any art that justifies the name can speak to us on various levels, but when a composer like the Latvian Peteris Vasks alludes to 'tanks, cruise missiles and oppressed peoples' (as in the second movement of Voices ('Balsis'), memories of mere news footage hardly constitute profound recollection. Which is where music comes in, especially when it hints at the emotional turmoil that Vasks and his people have endured and overcome. The story that Voices (1991) tells is far from comfortable. Even the birdsong that dominates the second movement is cast in a minor key (nothing like the wonder-struck chirrupings that fill Bartok's various 'night music' episodes) and the grinding dissonances that invade the third movement (at, say, 4'12") are deeply unsettling. And yet there is serenity, too, the sort that Kancheli writes on to his similarly disquieting canvases, albeit using rather fewer notes.

Vasks's style is consistent with his best Baltic contemporaries. Thematic germs are invariably simple or hymn-like and the music is grounded on a secure tonal base. But where Kancheli plays on violent contrasts between dynamic extremes, Vasks - like Part in, say, Fratres - is more prone to employ sustained crescendos.

The single-movement violin concerto Distant Light ('Tala gaisma') was composed in 1996-7 for Gidon Kremer and his newly-formed Kremerata Baltica and was indeed the very first work that they recorded. Early on in the work, sporadic pizzicatos signal subtle changes in volume or texture. Vasks uses solo cadenzas rather as Shostakovich does in his First Violin Concerto, as a way to accumulate tension. The first cadenza works towards a sudden increase in tempo and a folk-like jagged figure (as from 11'01") which in turn takes us on to a second cadenza and, beyond a spot of heated argument, a return to relative lyricism. Some of the later passages create a distinctly romantic aura, though 'aleatoric chaos' sets in shortly before the end. It's a real violin concerto, ardent and technically exacting with plenty of chordal work and soaring melodic lines that should please any discerning virtuoso. Kremer sounds in his element, and his command of rhythm and nuance are all that one might expect.

This is music with a message, music that recounts history in a way that recalls Shostakovich and - more subtly, perhaps - Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Its heartache and austerity will not suit all moods, but one cannot gainsay its sincerity or directness. The recordings pull no punches.

Rob Cowan
Gramophone, October 1999

Mate saule is Mother Sun – and Peteris Vasks worships her. Any meeting or interview with the Latvian composer is likely to end up with a tramp through the forests or a swim in the Baltic. And much of Vasks’s music is a meditation on the eternal attributes of Nature, in a continuum of life which stretches beyond the fever and the fret of his own fast-changing world.

Mate saule is an early choral work, its voices oscillating like the shimmer of a sun slowly rising from the horizon, and lit by flares and fragments of chant. Vasks’s choral music has tended to be instrumental in texture, focusing on the overall mood rather than the specific verbal activity of any text he is setting.

The ‘white diatonicism’ of Mate saule gives way to more disturbed, aleatoric harmonies and more disruptive textures as political change and human turmoil take centre stage in the late Eighties in Zemgale, a song about the anguished dilemmas of exile.

This is a subject at the very core of the work of the Polish-Lithuanian writer Czeslaw Milosz (now resident in the USA); and the three poems set by Vasks in 1994 receive their world premiere recording. They were originally written for the Hilliard Ensemble: here the excellent Latvian Radio Choir works with concentrated focus on the spare harmonies and elusive metres which recreate the wonder of three transient moments out of time.

Hilary Finch
Music Magazine