Sometimes I wonder whether we here in Britain can understand the creative work of East European peoples who have been persistently invaded, abused, repressed and occupied by foreign forces. True, any art that justifies the name can speak to us on various levels, but when a composer like the Latvian Peteris Vasks alludes to ‘tanks, cruise missiles and oppressed peoples’ (as in the second movement of Voices (‘Balsis’), memories of mere news footage hardly constitute profound recollection. Which is where music comes in, especially when it hints at the emotional turmoil that Vasks and his people have endured and overcome. The story that Voices (1991) tells is far from comfortable. Even the birdsong that dominates the second movement is cast in a minor key (nothing like the wonder-struck chirrupings that fill Bartok’s various ‘night music’ episodes) and the grinding dissonances that invade the third movement (at, say, 4'12'') are deeply unsettling. And yet there is serenity, too, the sort that Kancheli writes on to his similarly disquieting canvases, albeit using rather fewer notes.
Vasks’s style is consistent with his best Baltic contemporaries. Thematic germs are invariably simple or hymn-like and the music is grounded on a secure tonal base. But where Kancheli plays on violent contrasts between dynamic extremes, Vasks – like Part in, say, Fratres – is more prone to employ sustained crescendos.
The single-movement violin concerto Distant Light (‘Tala gaisma’) was composed in 1996-7 for Gidon Kremer and his newly-formed Kremerata Baltica and was indeed the very first work that they recorded. Early on in the work, sporadic pizzicatos signal subtle changes in volume or texture. Vasks uses solo cadenzas rather as Shostakovich does in his First Violin Concerto, as a way to accumulate tension. The first cadenza works towards a sudden increase in tempo and a folk-like jagged figure (as from 11'01'') which in turn takes us on to a second cadenza and, beyond a spot of heated argument, a return to relative lyricism. Some of the later passages create a distinctly romantic aura, though ‘aleatoric chaos’ sets in shortly before the end. It’s a real violin concerto, ardent and technically exacting with plenty of chordal work and soaring melodic lines that should please any discerning virtuoso. Kremer sounds in his element, and his command of rhythm and nuance are all that one might expect.
This is music with a message, music that recounts history in a way that recalls Shostakovich and – more subtly, perhaps – Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Its heartache and austerity will not suit all moods, but one cannot gainsay its sincerity or directness. The recordings pull no punches.'