Pēteris Vasks

Viatore gathers three works for strings and orchestra by the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks: the title piece and Musica adventus, both for string orchestra, and a concerto for cor anglais. All three are played by Sinfonietta Rīga under Normunds Šnē, who is also the soloist in the concerto.

Vasks was born on 16 April 1946 in Aizpute, Latvia. The recordings were made in Riga in June 2007, with Kārlis Pinnis and Vilnis Kaksis as engineers and liner notes by Arnolds Klotiņš. The production had the support of the PRO MUSICA VIVA Maria Stecker-Daelen Stiftung. Šnē conducts the orchestra and plays the cor anglais in the concerto, so the whole disc stays in the hands of one Riga ensemble and its director.

Musica adventus is a work in four movements lasting over 27 minutes. Viatore, a single movement of about sixteen and a half minutes, also exists in a version for organ, subtitled Hommage à Arvo Pärt, which Wergo recorded with Tālivaldis Deksnis (WER 6712 2). The Concerto per corno inglese ed orchestra has four movements, framed by two elegies: Elegy I, Folk Music, Elegy II and a Postlude. The elegies last about seven and five minutes, the closing Postlude about three. Its second movement is the only one in the programme named after folk music.

Schott presents Vasks as a composer of ethical and spiritual conviction, for whom mankind must take responsibility for life on earth and for its own spirituality. The destruction of nature remains one of his central themes, and over time it has widened into a confrontation between good and evil, the spiritual and the material, nature and culture, solitude and totality, the worldly and the eternal. In Schott's words, Vasks is a man of passion and frankness, and these contradictions are carried by the emotional character of his music, which opens onto a world of nature without borders or limits. The two string orchestra works and the concerto, with its elegies, give three angles on that outlook in one programme.

CD, Wergo WER 6705 2, released in 2008 in Wergo's Pēteris Vasks series. Total running time 67'03".