The most inventive works amongst these chamber pieces by Vasks (b.1946) are the solo items, Landscape with Birds, for flute (1980), and the prosaically titled Book for cello (1978). In both, the severity of the instrumental constraint liberated the composer, the music exploring the limits of the ranges of instrument and performer: in Landscape, this reminded me of pieces by the Icelander Sigurbjornsson, which combine radical means with diatonic lyricism; in Book, the cellist's wordless singing creates a pseudo-polyphonic texture like the sympathetic strings on a lute. Both works are a delight.

The larger-scale pieces do not live up to the same standard. In fact, for all its earnestness of inspiration, the 1992 Fantasia for piano, subtitled Landscapes of a burnt-out earth, strikes me as a set of doodles in search of a composition, not a finished product. Episodi e canto perpetuo, a piano trio written in 1985, starts off in a similar vein, but in the fourth of its six episodes something of more moment emerges. The climax comes in the sixth, "Burlesca II", from which the aching melody of the "Canto perpetuo" (inexplicably split into two indivisible 'movements') runs on. By the same token, the wind quintet Music for a Deceased Friend (1981) is partly hamstrung by the emotiveness of the subject (the death of bassoonist Jana Barinska). Its performance is exemplary, like that of all the works here, conveyed with the utmost commitment and technique, matched by a crisp, if clinical recording.

Guy S. Rickards
(From: Gramophone, February 1997)