A lot changed in Latvia between the early 1980s and the late 2010s. So, therefore, did the music of the composer most tightly bound to the nation’s idea of itself.

One constant is nature. Vēstījums (‘Message’) for two pianos, percussion and string orchestra was effectively Pēteris Vasks’s first large-scale work. A sort of earth cry, the piece rails against man’s hubris in the face of nature’s beauty, culminating in a swarm of dissonance.

If that could have been read as an allegory for Soviet occupation in 1983 Riga, the 20-minute orchestral slab Lauda of two years later would prove rather less subtle. Its context was the outpouring of expression that year to mark 150 years since the birth of the Latvian folklorist Krišjānis Barons, which blossomed into a sort of candle-bearing spiritual protest that some say set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the Singing Revolution.

From its alto flute induction, Lauda builds (in typically Vasks-like waves) to a scorching aleatoric climax. The ending is no less typical. After a period of rest, the piece signs off on an upward glissando like a plume of smoke ascending and disappearing.

Three decades later, the pain of Latvia and its people is receding into memory. Vasks’s Oboe Concerto for Albrecht Mayer is a pastoral and mostly major-key affair, compared by the composer to ‘a human life with its beginning, period of maturity and departure’. The finale has some grit, clawing upwards in an unmistakably Vasks-like manner (and a minor key) before a calm coda suggests new life hatching out (another upwards swoon ends the piece). There’s something Ivesian in the central Scherzando’s gathering up of plenteous activity over a folk-song cantus firmus.

Before both, riffing on Latvian folk melodies, the concerto’s opening movement seems uncharacteristically nonchalant. ‘This is what my country sounds like’, says Vasks, but it sounds a lot like Vaughan Williams’s middle England. Mayer plays it smoothly and suavely, but I’m drawn to the conclusion that Vasks is at his best when the chips are down.