There are riches flowing from the Skani label, currently doing internationally for Latvian music what Dacapo previously has for Danish. This release has the label’s ‘house’ Liepāja Symphony Orchestra traverse three works by Latvian-American Gundaris Pone (1932 94), often associated with Luigi Nono and a progressive whose legacy continues courtesy of the Poné Ensemble for New Music in New York.

Pone considered himself and his music Latvian, but America (where he lived from 11) and Italy loom large on an album that opens with his seven pictures of Venice, La Serenissima. Immediately you are alerted to a distinctive musical imagination and a singular view of the orchestra. Movements depict light and shadows in streets and squares; the severity of the old Venetian justice system; the shifting mood of the city’s waters; our collective idea of Venice’s connection to death; and finally a movement partially titled ‘spectral Venice’ in which Cole Porter’s ‘It’s de lovely’ floats by like a ghostly gondola only to be enveloped by fog. Pone can always surprise you with what he reaches for, thematically as well as texturally.

American Portraits was premiered by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra some time in the 1985 86 season. Exactly when, we don’t know – one of many miniature mysteries that shrouds Pone, another being the identity of the investor, film star, financier, gangster and military genius depicted by turns across five movements (‘all legendary figures – some in a good way, some in a bad way’, commented the composer). The movie star pouts and postures, while Ray Henderson’s ‘Five foot two, eyes of blue’ invades the seedy Chicago atmosphere of the gangster’s music as does a Yankee military march the military genius’s. Always, the invading material rubs up Ives-like against a consistently rigorous and complex prevailing discourse to febrile effect.

Berg looms in that piece but features literally in Avanti!, the most substantial work on the disc if, at times, the most inscrutable. Its commissioners in Toronto claimed it unplayable in 1975 but the accomplished Liepāja orchestra dispatch it fluently on this recording made in their acoustically pristine hall. Of the three, this piece sounds the most Latvian to my ears, but only passingly – in the moments of strenuous lyrical incantation. The work can feel a little compartmentalised and, again, features three cameos from strong tunes: the traditional Latvian melody ‘With battle cries on our lips’; the ‘Wir arme Leut’ motif from Wozzeck and Bach’s chorale melody for ‘O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid’ (Wozzeck also appears to be referenced when the orchestra gradually piles on a single note, echoing the link between scenes 2 and 3 in the opera’s third act). The question – having enjoyed all three pieces while noting that Pone appears to be at his considerable best when refracting other people’s material – is what he sounds like when using music exclusively from his own pen. Perhaps more from Skani will help us find out.