The year 1940 was a dramatic one for Latvia. The country was overtaken by the Soviets, then the Nazis, then the Soviets again. The Fifth Symphony of Jānis Ivanovs (1906 83), written after the brutal winter of 1944 45, contains music that might be thought to reflect this cultural and political confusion, but he was reticent in the extreme, saying only ‘This contains everything that had accumulated over those years’. As the detailed booklet notes by Orests Silabriedis explain, the subsequent career of the symphony was ambiguous in the extreme: the only remedy is actually to listen to the music.

It’s a powerful, brooding work. While it might at the time have been seen by some to be under the shadow of Shostakovich, and while that element is not entirely absent, perhaps especially in the first movement, the work is a good deal more than such a characterisation might suggest. Ivanovs’s melodic style is very much his own, and the orchestral textures, notably in the second and fourth movements, are also highly individual. Nevertheless, while the performance is more than committed, it is a difficult work to love; its author’s fingerprints notwithstanding, it seems to be, in spite of its supposed content, a work lacking a genuine voice.

Juris Karlsons (b1948) was a pupil of Ivanovs, and his work was commissioned for the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War (or the Great Patriotic War, as it was known in the Eastern Bloc) in 1985. The programme included Ivanovs’s Fifth Symphony. Karlsons’s brief work was written as an evocation of the period; and while beautifully scored, in most respects it still seems a hostage to the stylistic imperatives of that time – even in the accordion-coloured waltz it is difficult to sense the quotation marks. But the final minutes of the work are luminous and full of hope, something the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra under Andris Poga understand very well indeed.