Pēteris Vasks

Two large orchestral works by the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks, played by Latvian musicians: the Concerto for flute and orchestra (2007/08, revised 2011) with Dita Krenberga as soloist, and the Third Symphony (2004/05), his longest orchestral work to that date. The Liepāja Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Atvars Lakstīgala.

Vasks was born in Aizpute, Latvia, on 16 April 1946. His early music was influenced by Bartók, Shostakovich and the New Polish School, and after 1990 he turned towards the minimalism coming from Estonia. The recordings were made in the Great Amber concert hall in Liepāja, the symphony in February 2016 and the concerto in May 2016. The disc belongs to Wergo's series devoted to the composer.

The concerto is built symmetrically. A burlesque middle movement, Quasi una burlesca, is framed by two elegiac movements marked Cantabile, which flow in calm. Wind chorales and the distant ringing of bells alternate with passages whose mood moves from meditation through lament to euphoria. The work was commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk and written for the flautist Michael Faust, who gave the premiere at the Kölner Philharmonie on 23 January 2009 with the WDR Sinfonieorchester under Semyon Bychkov.

The Third Symphony began with a request from the Tampere Filharmonia in Finland for an introductory piece of fifteen to twenty minutes. Trusting his own inner voices, Vasks wrote a symphonic landscape of more than forty minutes in six movements. He said he wanted to represent the beauty of the world God created, the destiny of humanity and the fate of the Latvian people. The symphony speaks, in his words, "of love and fidelity to basic principles, of loss, and of the strength to rise and move forward". Like its predecessors it is transparent in texture. Rarely are there more than two sound events at once, one of them usually a static background, and there is little counterpoint. Melodic gestures, atmosphere and instrumental colour set its character, which carries the Baltic and Finnish air of his later music.

CD, Wergo WER 7349 2, released in 2016 in the Pēteris Vasks series.