There are now enough recordings of Pēteris Vasks’s first violin concerto Distant Light (1997) to furnish a Gramophone Collection. Here is the first recording of its successor, In Evening Light. We hear Vasks in the evening of his own life, looking back with little of the reassurance the concerto’s predecessor was searching for in the early years of Latvia’s independence from the Soviet Union. It is sobering to consider Vasks writing this new concerto before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the newly fragile state his country finds itself in.

Still, Vasks is Vasks – unmistakable in his prayerfulness, his improvisatory fluency, his oscillation between violent lamentation and transcendent contentedness. This piece concerns the central themes of almost all his work: light (nature) and love, and the search for peace in both. Vasks’s signature sound and chant-like stepwise melodies are there from the off in a mobile Andante con passione that arrives at an earthy cadenza which itself distils the journey of the movement in microcosm.

The central Andante cantabile – almost as long as its surrounding movements put together – winds itself up into a frantic state via what you might initially think is an innocently playful scherzo, and arrives at a more severe cadenza. The Andante con amore searches again, through fear and agitation and some melodic shapes and modalities a little out of Vasks’s heartland, to a radiant C sharp major. Yes, some of Vasks’s gestures flirt with the passé – the music’s tendency to hold its breath and then hover in silence before shifting into a contrasting state (other Latvian composers imitate it, yet somehow always sound more hackneyed), but the composer’s honesty can hardly be questioned.

Often the soloist sounds as a primus inter pares within the resonant, thick-set string orchestra (a Vasks speciality) but the violin line is always cantabile. Sebastian Bohren plays it with an amber-like tone, so clean and pure even in its most stringent of attaccas and frenzied incantations. He is caught in unusually fine sound by Andreas Neubronner: immersive yet crystal-clear, despite the necessary resonance. Paul Suits’s arrangement of Schubert’s Rondo brillant is given a misty, Vasks-like demeanour by the sound picture, but we’re further from the tutti ensemble than in the Vasks. I’m not entirely convinced by the programming of that piece, when dozens of others might have proved more amplifying. But it’s good to close with Lonely Angel (2006), which might be described as Vasks’s own The Lark Ascending – Bohren’s violin again in glistening solo flight against the composer’s supporting strings. We might not have another Distant Light on our hands but there’s plenty to enjoy in these exquisite performances and their unusually fine capturing.