For their second disc of Vasks’s choral music on the Finnish Ondine label, the compellingly brilliant Latvian Radio Choir concentrate on his secular a cappella repertory. The texts are mostly by Latvian poets, the exception being The Sad Mother by the Chilean Gabriela Mistral (although it is sung in a Latvian translation). Their messages encompass the spiritual dimensions of nature, hope and love, sleep and yearning for the sun.

The music recorded here spans 30 years, 1978-2008, a period which included the tail end of brutal Soviet occupation to the rebirth of an independent nation, which had survived against the odds. The earliest piece, Summer, for female voices only, soars ecstatically, with the poise of Stanford’s Blue Bird. The miniature Small, Warm Holiday is equally sublime and accomplished.

Intensity and integrity are the hallmarks of Vasks’s style. He writes in a harmonically rich, reassuringly diatonic idiom, clothed in beautifully balanced and largely homophonic textures. He ranges from the introspectively evocative Silent Songs (Poulenc meeting Górecki) to the more assertive and adventurous Our Mother’s Names. Extended vocal techniques are even more to the fore in The Tomtit’s Message, with its ethereal clusters, glissandos, grunts, groans and whistles.

However, the most compelling piece is the album’s title-track, Plainscapes, an extended vocalise with string duo accompaniment, commissioned by Gidon Kremer in 2002. Although almost too harrowingly beautiful to listen to, I do recommend this magical piece, which together with its companions is performed with consummate perfection by
this outstanding body of singers.