Vasks: Message

"Where there is no emotion,there is no art",writes P.Vasks on his CD.Really,there is an abundance of emotions - sometimes naive,sometimes too pathetic,sometimes over-dramatic or kitchy,like in Cor Anglais.Nevertheles ,"Cantabile","Musica Dolorosa" and "Lauda" are worth your attention.I would call Peteris Vasks the most important composer to emerge from the former Soviet Union AFTER Arvo Part,Alfred Schnittke,Valentin Silvestrov,Sofia Gubaidulina , Edison Denisov and even Giya Kancheli.

I cannot think of a greater living composer, and I think I checked most of them out.

This is one of my favorite CDs. I enjoy listening to contemporary Eastern European composers, so I bought this CD because it was cheap, long (over 76 minutes of music), and because it contains music written by a Latvian, Peteris Vasks, born in 1946. I did not know much about Vasks or his music before purchasing the CD, but I am very glad that I chose to buy it.

Cantabile is a shorter piece, slightly over eight minutes long that starts off the album. It is an uplifting piece, written for string orchestra. Its expressed emotion is joy. Unlike some of the pieces on this album, it does not stray into dissonance, although it does have aleatoric passages like many of the other pieces.

The Cor Anglais Concerto looked very interesting, I'd never heard a concerto for Cor Anglais before. Its four movements total approximately twenty minutes. The first and third movements are titled "Elegy I" and "Elegy II." That gives you a good idea of what the concerto's intended emotion is. The Cor Anglais can get playful and virtuosic sometimes, especially in the second movement titled "Folk Music", specifically in the cadenza, but it mostly sticks to the emotion of mournfulness.

Message is around fifteen minutes long. It is scored for string orchestra, percussion, and two pianos. Tension and Dissonance play a major role in this piece, as do melody and harmony. In the words of Rusmanis in the liner notes, Message is "a battle between the forces of good and evil." I find that Vasks has made both the melodious and dissonant parts to be very beautiful, but in different ways. There is a lot of freedom given to the performers, where they can improvise on a set of notes. I dislike a lot of more western modern music, and 20th centry Polish music as well for being too dissonant and clashing too much. I do not feel this way about Vasks' music, even though it is aleatoric and often dissonant. Dissonant music can still be very beautiful, and this piece is one of the best examples.

Musica Dolorosa is twelve and a half minutes long. It is written about tragedy, and is in my opinion the most emotionally intense piece on the album.

Lauda is a little over twenty minutes long, and is the last piece on the album. It was written as a tribute to the Latvian people. It is a nice piece, and I enjoy it. It does not have the intensity of Musica Dolorosa or the beauty of the Cor Anglais concerto. It is still recognizably Vasks' work though. It has its own facets making it unique and beautiful.

I recommend this CD. It is a unique CD, especially for those who unlike me do not have a large collection of music by contemporary Eastern European composers. Even among the music I listen to, though, I consider it to be unqiue, and it is one of my favorites.
It is a great price for a lot of music, and the music is top notch. The sound quality is great, and the conductor & orchestra understand the music very well. I prefer to hear music played by orchestras & composers from the country of the composer because they tend to interpret the music better, and their skill is just as good as that of the more famous western orchestras. The Riga Philharmonic does an excellent job, and Normunds Schnee handles the Cor Anglais concerto skillfully.