Peteris Vasks

Review: Vasks compositions incorporate archaic, folklore elements from Latvian music and place them within a dynamic and challenging relationship with the language of contemporary music. The works are frequently given programmatic titles based on natural processes. Vasks' intentions are however not so much a purely poetic praise of nature or showy tone painting, but rather the pursuit of themes such as the complex interaction between man and nature and the beauty of life on the one hand but also the imminent ecological and moral destruction of the world which he expresses in musical language.

Songlist: Carnival Song

8767b | Songbook $11.95 | SSSSAAAA Arrangements for 8 Parts

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4330b | Songbook $8.95 | SATB Choral Arrangements from The Baltics

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4329b | Songbook $12.95 | SSAA Choral Arrangements from The Baltics

Review: Text in Latvian.

11239b | Songbook $13.50 | SSAATTBB

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4331b | Songbook $18.95 | SATB Choral Arrangements from The Baltics

Review: Central to Vask's work are human beings and nature. The beauty of nature versus the threat of it, and the human role in it. His human and cultural image is therefore not very optimistic. However, in his work Vasks expresswes wonder and beauty. Especially in his early compositions. The choral work Mate Saule (Mother Sun) from 1975 is one such work. It seems nothing but an evocation of a sun with sparse melodies that break away from the sound as halos and sun breaking through the clouds. Meanwhile, this work is also a piece that is exemplary for the later choral works of Vasks. Although the piece is almost entirely diatonic, drop the instrumental notation for the votes and nice dissonant textures right on. These are things that Vasks in his later work refined and enriched.

Songlist: Mother Sun

8771b | Songbook $8.95 | SSAATTBB Arrangements for 8 Parts

Review: The beauty of the Latvian landscape inspired many of my works, for it has given me moments of exceptional happiness. The plains are a dominant feature of the Latvian countryside, a place where one can see the horizon and look at the stars in the sky. Plainscapes is made up of three Vocalises separated by little interludes. The dynamic of this diatonic, meditative composition is piano almost throughout. At the end of the third Vocalise the mood changes, however. A growing crescendo leads to the climax - to the vision of Nature awakening. (Peteris Vasks). For Mixed Choir (SSAATTBB), Violin and Violoncello. This item includes just the violin and cello score.

11085b | Songbook $17.95 | SATB

Review: Peteris Vasks' strong attachment to his Latvian home country shows particularly in his choral music. Nature, customs and traditions as well as the idea of freedom are the central themes of the texts he sets to music, while carefully using modern techniques of choral singing as well. Alternating with traditional, even archaic singing, the music creates a multi-faceted, immediately effective sound image in the listener's mind. These six songs for female choir centre on the themes of man, nature and transience, and home in aphoristic brevity. Vasks wrote music on these folk poems which contains rewarding tasks for the choir and opens up a fascinating world of sound to the listener.

Songlist: The Sad Mother, Small, Warm Holiday, Sunmmer

7341b | Songbook $9.95 | SSAA Northern European Choral Arrangements

Review: For mixed choir (SATB) and piano, based on a text by Mother Teresa. Text in English.

11238b | Songbook $7.95 | SATB

Review: Peteris Vasks (1946), Latvia's most prominent composer, was the son of a Baptist minister, and while he always felt a strong affinity for sacred music, he didn't feel free to express it through vocal music since it would never have been allowed to be performed under the Communist regime. Since the early '90s, he has turned his attention more and more to religious texts, and this CD includes three of his most significant sacred choral works, including a setting of the Mass. Vasks' style of choral writing links him to the composers who have come to be described as "holy minimalists," a group that includes Part, Gorecki, Kancheli, and Tavener, whose music, while stylistically diverse, tends to rely on tonal and modal harmonies, is frequently harmonically static or slow-moving and is often linked to plainchant and ancient liturgical traditions. Vasks' choral music is firmly rooted in Western polyphony and is for the most part traditional-sounding; there is little in it apart from certain unconventional harmonic progressions that would make it immediately identifiable as a product of the late twentieth century. Among the other holy minimalists, the sound of his music is most closely related to that of Gorecki in its harmonic textures and the somber earnestness of its moods. The three works recorded here are polyphonically and harmonically sensual, in spite of their serious tone. An exception to the sober tone is the Mass' Sanctus, which, while not exactly lighthearted, is lively; the composer imagines it "sung by happy, little angels." The Latvian Radio Choir sings with warmth and passion and with excellent control in the composer's extended, sustained vocal lines. Sigvards Klava, conducting Sinfonietta Riga, leads them in deeply felt performances. The CD should be of interest both to fans of choral music and of new trends in minimalism tinged with Romanticism.

Songlist: Pater noster, Dona Nobis Pacem, Missa

8684c | 1 CD $16.95 Latvian Choral Music

Review: Peteris Vasks' songs for mixed choir, like all of his compositions, provide a look at events, a portrait of the times. Quality, not quantity, is the keyword. This recording contains those compositions which the composer feels to be his best contributions to a genre which he has approached relatively sparingly.

Songlist: Three Poems By Czeslaw Milosz, Window, So Little, Encounter, Zemgale, Mate Saule (Mother Sun), Madrigals (Madrigal)#, Litene# (Ballad for 12-voiced chorus to a text by Uldis Berzins ), I, II, Dona nobis pacem

7837c | 1 CD $15.98 Latvian Choral Music