Spatially recorded Vasks from the Munich Radio Orchestra has a particular quality, a parallel immersive throbbing to that associated with the Latvian Radio Choir and evident on the predecessor to this release (2/21). It suits the Latvian’s orchestral music very well, founded as it is on resonant, spread string sounds, evoking the intensity of prayer and a crepuscular, communal embrace.

That this instalment doesn’t quite match its predecessor is down to the music, not the performance. Vasks’s Cello Concerto No 2, Klātbātne (‘Presence’), charts the development of the composer’s time on earth, from baby steps to idealism and from disillusionment to aggression, eventually depicting his soul ascending into the cosmos. It ends with a vocal lullaby – sung by Sol Gabetta when she premiered the work but contributed here by the soprano Anna-Maria Palii.

Uladzimir Sinkevich’s recording perhaps has the edge over Gabetta’s, his tone just a bit more wholegrain, his demeanour that bit more rich and tearful, and his tremolo glissandos at the end of the piece miraculous. With the orchestra, his ‘recessed’ sound for those moments when Vasks suddenly retreats inwards is a delicacy and his amber lyricism is ideal, the ensemble always on point and idiomatic behind him. Not so convincing is the architecture of the actual score, which despite containing some of Vasks’s most striking moments (the final folk song/lullaby included), tenses and loosens the same material just a few too many times.

The three ‘musica’ pieces form a neat triptych prelude to the concerto, and here the Munich strings offer more of that mentioned above. Musica dolorosa is associated with despair, written in the depths of Soviet occupation, yet still sounds more spirited than Musica serena of 2015, Vasks’s idea of a ‘light, singing’ tribute to the conductor Juha Kangas. Both are more concise than Musica appassionata of 2002, which obsesses over one gesture more out of protest than passion, though in Vasks’s case the two are indistinguishable. Whatever the level of the music, these Bavarians and their recording engineers have found a resonant sound style for Vasks’s music, which is surely his biggest interpretative challenge.