Peteris Vasks: Symphony No. 2; Violin Concerto "Distant Light"

Peteris Vasks: Symphony No. 2; Violin Concerto "Distant Light" | Peteris Vasks, John Storgårds, ... | Thematically Stirring, A Brilliant Program

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	Peteris Vasks: Symphony No. 2; Violin Concerto "Distant Light" Peteris Vasks, John Storgårds, ... Ondine, 2003 average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This is the world premiere recording of Vasks' second symphony. It is a 40-minute, one-movement work which opens with a glorious bang, with the orchestra at its most powerful and busy. A few minutes in, Vasks offers us repose which is almost religious, there is a buildup and then more reflection, and a long crescendo to great might again. The work ends on a beautifully introspective, soft, haunting refrain. Vasks is primarily a Romantic, so the work is tonal; there are touches of Kancheli (but not as much breast-beating), Shostakovich (again, not as pessimistic). It's a beautiful, very satisfying work, and the scoring is fascinating in its use of bells, xylophone, and many woodwinds. The violin concerto is somewhat more thorny in its harmonic approachability, but it also has a faraway aura and texture to it at times which is both melancholy and mellow. Its cadenzas are real virtuoso moments, and John Storgårds plays it all beautifully (Juha Kangas conducts this work). The performances of both orchestras are sublime and the sound is big, clean and vibrant. The combination of familiarity and daring here is most worthwhile. --Robert Levine

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Walking where no-one has walked

Seeing what no-one has seen - there's something of that in the appeal of this first-rate CD. But the exellent, almost unheard of music, which twists through many moods and voicings is the real selling point. Storgards plays brilliantly in 'Distant Light' and the orchestral support is excellent. Sonics are full and deliver the frequency extremes. Anyone with the a detectable sympathy for 20th Century music would enjoy this disc.

Thematically Stirring, A Brilliant Program

Peteris Vasks' recorded works stand alone in their power to evoke the mysticism of the spiritual loner. This tonal, Romantically inclined single movement symphony opens with a roar, like a beast let out of its cage only to reflect on what this newly wrought freedom portends. Like his heartbreaking chamber pieces, the music reflects inwardly. His is the work of a contemplative whose spiritual eruptions bring thought more so than joy.
John Storgards delivers this music with an unflinching eye toward the dialectics in the writing as well as in the message. The Tempere Philarmonic seems born to play this music. There is a going for it that you don't always hear in well executed overproduced pieces. This is analogous in avant garde music to King Crimson's mighty beast that can roar with frenetic energy in something like "Fractured", and then resolve all this dynamism in spiritual questions like "One Life." Nothing is resolved with this work: the progressions escalate and then leave the listener in free fall. Isn't spirituality just that. Much was always made of Kierkegaard's Leap of Faith. This is the music that accompanies the mendicant after the leap and before he has reached his safety, if in fact it exists.
Storgards returns to essay the Violin Concerto in the second piece of this remarkable program. Thematically complementary, it harkens to Vasks' remarkable "Message." The call and response of the Kangas' Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra heightens the drama.
Along with Rautavaara and Erki-Sven Tuur, the Scandanavian and Baltic movements in classical music have taken the directions in music of the late Twentieth Century and have sought to find a tonal refrain to the serialism, minimalism, free-jazz sensibilities that were championed. In dealing with the Soviet pessimism of Shostakovitch, the abstract detachment of Morton Feldman, these writers, like their countrymen caught in the middle, have sought to uncover the ground of Being, and there in find the human alive.
This is a stirring program start to finish. Masterfull and lyrical, human and profound, it is all we are when we stop for a moment and consider our place in the universe. Is that a distant light we see at the end of the tunnel of our lives, a new horizon, that first ray of a light that will reveal what is thinking, what is living.....

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Classical Music is Alive and Well

This is a fantastic release and was introduction to both Vasks and, beside Rautavaara, modern music by living composers. I was thrilled to hear a composer who created things with an audience in mind. This is emotional, dramatic, thrilling, beautiful, and wonderfully orchestrated music. The second symphony seems is reminiscient of Shostakovich in some ways, mixed with the Rautavaara of [on the last frontier], and is slightly cinematic at times.
The Violin Concerto is a modern masterpiece. LIke the Bartok Piano Concerto 2, on the first several listen you barely realize that you are listening to a small scale string ensemble[just brass in the Bartok 2]-because the economy of his composition and ability to create unique sounds with just strings make think you are listening to bigger music than you actually are. The piece ends as it begins, coming into, then out of, silence and takes you on a masterful journey culminating in a ghostly waltz.
There are, at last count, five recordings of this work, even Hyperion recorded it. For a new composition, that is very special-I can only think of several other modern works that can claim that[Gorecki Sym3 comes to mind].
Now that I am familiar with Vasks, and if you enjoy this disc, I strongly recommend Lauda, ondines release of Symphony 3 and his wonderul Cello Concerto, and his disc of Choral music.
Highly Recomennded!

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Confusion and search for gods ... this is rather profound music.

I don't expect to be of any help to the reader, (and I don't care one bit ;-) but anyhow, the following is what I have to say ...

There seems to be a truthfulness shining through in this music, a sense of mysticism, rooted in deeply religious/cultural/spiritual sensibilities that have been subdued (but never destroyed) by different regimes and socio-political upheavals over the centuries in Latvia (as in the rest of the Baltic states, which have always had profound indigenous religions of their own). These mystical-religious undercurrents seem to be feeding the deeply human core of this music, at the same time evoking the pain and sorrow of centuries of Modernity, of (world) war(s) and repression of indigenous - more mythically based - sensibilities, values and truths.
I would like to quote the profound words from the certain Lithuanian-American philosophical writer Vincent Vycinas, which in my view eminently capture what this music is trying to convey:

"By repeated inquiries into the meaning of man's way of being, [we] painstaikingly but persistently [try] to disclose his inner core and his way in his cultural world. [We do] this by repeatedly plunging into the event of Western philosophy with no intention to settle in any philosophical system, but with a tendency to protrude into the pre- or post-philosophical milieu. This milieu is mythical."

And, going on from there:

"Sometimes everything in a man's individual life or in the life of a society seems to run smoothly and with ease, but not for too long: very soon man or society experiences blows of destiny and is thrown around in confusion. Often this confusion is not of a superficial nature, affecting some secondary points in human life. A crisis frequently shakes up the very cornerstones of the cultural edifice. Digging himself out from the ruins of his fallen world, man, half buried in debries of his own creation, raises his head with the questions glaring in his eyes: who am I? What is the mission of my life? Which are the guiding criteria of my ways in my own world? What is my world? Lost and burdened with essential or principle problems man goes out looking firstly for unperishable powers of reality which would help him out from his entanglement in the confusion of perishable things or aims. After each of many crises in his world man steps out on the ways of a search for gods."

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reviews: page 1, 2

Tracks
Symphony No. 2 | Distant Light (Violin Concerto)

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