Pēteris Vasks

String Quartets Nos. 1, 3 and 4 by Pēteris Vasks, played by the Latvian Spīķeru String Quartet. With the earlier disc of Nos. 2 and 5, this completes the quartets on Wergo, released for the composer's 70th birthday. The three works span 1977 to 1999 and show the basic principles of his language with great consistency.

Vasks was born in 1946 in Aizpute in western Latvia and spent most of his life under Soviet rule. He witnessed the suppression of the Latvian language and the deliberate Russification of his people, and that pain became the dramatic core of his music. The quartet here is Antti Kortelainen and Marta Spārniņa (violins), Ineta Abakuka (viola) and Ēriks Kiršfelds (cello). The recording was made in the GORS concert hall in Rēzekne in May and July 2014, with Normunds Šnē as engineer. Jānis Petraškevičs wrote the booklet notes.

His music carries recurring symbols: birdsong for ultimate freedom, Latvian folk elements as a reminder of identity, toccata-like passages of dark brutal force, and aleatoric episodes of despair and chaos. The disc opens with the Fourth Quartet (1999), the longest at 34 minutes, which ends in a vast, transcendent "Meditation". In the First Quartet (1977, revised 1997) tortured, frantic statements are set against a strained slow chorale. The Third Quartet (1995), with its nature sounds, a distinctive Latvian folk dance and a tense Adagio, links the other two.

Vasks has said he always dreamed his music would be heard where unhappy people gather, in hospitals, prisons and crowded trams, consoling and questioning. Reviewing the disc for The Strad, Andrew Mellor found the quartet attuned to Vasks's hallmarks of "textural lightness" and "fragile unisons", helped by sparing vibrato. He answered critics of the music's lightness of material by finding the idiom effective with the minimal material Vasks gives it. He also praised the players for knowing when to tense up and when to loosen. He called the sound perfect, combining proximity and detail with the depth of the room.

CD, Wergo WER 7330 2, released in 2016, with a 24-page booklet in German and English. The companion disc of Quartets Nos. 2 and 5 is WER 7329 2.