Most works by Vasks present, in one form or another, a journey towards the light – that of political emancipation or spiritual enlightenment. In the Viola Concerto, written for Maxim Rysanov in the middle of the last decade, the journey is more strained than usual. The viola would seem a perfect fit for Vasks’s pained and often introspective music but this score only demonstrates how little the tools actually matter – how deeply the composer’s music has accessed those things by its own volition.

The solo instrument hauls itself up through the first Andante into the heavy, minor-key, syncopated folk dance that is the Allegro moderato (only a Baltic soul would call it a ‘joyful dance’ as annotator Dāvis Eņģelis does) before a muzzled cadenza leads into the second Andante, which passes through a moment of ecstasy before the real fight kicks in. An Adagio finale ferries the work safely towards a luminous major tonality; upon arrival, I willed the music to rest there just a little longer. It is a score that assembles its parts typically slowly; but you also sense Vasks trying to push his standard modus operandi into a new place and not quite getting it to reside as comfortably there as it might.

On hand to contextualise the relatively new score is a classic: the composer’s first symphony, Balsis (‘Voices’), scored for strings alone and premiered in Finland precisely as revolution took hold in Latvia and its Baltic neighbours. It is unmistakable Vasks, from the early appearance of a signature chord to the late, downward bass glissando. It is clearly a protest piece, most obviously in the depiction of natural awakening conveyed vividly by the middle movement, ‘Voices of Life’, where a single key comes fidgeting and fluttering to life like an echo of Das Rheingold’s Prelude. In the third movement a shapely theme emerges that could almost have come from Shostakovich’s pen, before the orchestra swarms in furious solidarity. A moving coda follows but there’s not the resolution of the concerto; for Vasks, too many questions lay unanswered. Sinfonietta Riga sound with that Baltic mixture of softness and fervour under Rysanov’s direction and he brings rare feeling to the concerto.