Latvian Radio Choir

With this new release the award-winning Latvian Radio Choir together with its director Sigvards Kļava are returning to contemporary music after a series of recordings of 19th Century sacred choral works. Ramon Humet’s (b. 1968) new choral work, 'Llum', is a deep, spiritual journey to the gift of life, peace and love.

In these uncertain times, when changes seem so profound and unsettling, Marina Rebeka presents us with a selection of some of the most elevating music ever written to comfort and soothe the human spirit. Sacred music pieces by Mozart, Verdi, Stradella, Faur, Durante, Handel, Bach, and more, performed with the delicacy of Sinfonietta Riga and the Latvian Radio Choir, conducted by Modestas Pitrenas. This is music to listen to while reflecting on our own fragility, and understanding what is really important to us in life.

With this new album the award-winning Latvian Radio Choir conducted by Sigvards Klava is turning its attention to the music of Alexander Grechaninov (1864–1956), one of the masters of Russian liturgic music. Grechaninov’s All-Night Vigil is a fitting continuation to the choir’s albums of sacred music by Sergey Rachmaninov and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Together with the two latter names, Grechaninov’s All-Night Vigil, completed in 1912, belongs to the central repertoire of Russian liturgic music. Unlike the Vigils by Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, Grechaninov’s work was written primarily for concert use. Grechaninov’s All-Night Vigilis a bright, optimistic work full of light.

This album presents a sequel for the award-winning album (ICMA Choral disc of the year) of Tchaikovskys sacred choral works by the Latvian Radio Choir and conductor Sigvards Klava. These two albums together form the composers complete sacred works for the choir. The All-Night Vigil Op. 52 for mixed choir, also known as the Vesper Service, was written between May 1881 and March 1882. It was first performed by the Chudovsky Chorus conducted by Pyotr Sakharov in Moscow at the concert hall of the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition on 27 June 1882. Tchaikovsky described the work as An essay in harmonization of liturgical chants. For this work the composer carefully studied the tradition of musical practice in the Russian Orthodox Church, which could vary considerably from one region to another.

Mate saule is Mother Sun – and Peteris Vasks worships her. Any meeting or interview with the Latvian composer is likely to end up with a tramp through the forests or a swim in the Baltic. And much of Vasks’s music is a meditation on the eternal attributes of Nature, in a continuum of life which stretches beyond the fever and the fret of his own fast-changing world. Mate saule is an early choral work, its voices oscillating like the shimmer of a sun slowly rising from the horizon, and lit by flares and fragments of chant. Vasks’s choral music has tended to be instrumental in texture, focusing on the overall mood rather than the specific verbal activity of any text he is setting. The ‘white diatonicism’ of Mate saule gives way to more disturbed, aleatoric harmonies and more disruptive textures as political change and human turmoil take centre stage in the late Eighties in Zemgale, a song about the anguished dilemmas of exile. This is a subject at the very core of the work of the Polish-Lithuanian writer Czeslaw Milosz (now resident in the USA); and the three poems set by Vasks in 1994 receive their world premiere recording. They were originally written for the Hilliard Ensemble: here the excellent Latvian Radio Choir works with concentrated focus on the spare harmonies and elusive metres which recreate the wonder of three transient moments out of time.

Composed in 1910, but only reconstructed from parts as late as the 1980s, after a long period of obscurity, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is one of Sergey Rachmaninov's most profoundly moving choral works, as well as one of his most harmonically rich and sonically radiant compositions. This setting of the Liturgy, along with Rachmaninov's Vespers and other sacred pieces, enjoyed a significant revival in the 1990s during the general awakening of interest in religious music for meditative listening, and their popularity has continued through periodic releases of first-rate recordings.

A wonderful concert version of the revered Komitas Divine Liturgy! Here the great Komitas work is transformed into a concert mass in the first-ever recording of this appealing mixed choir version. This version was beautifully arranged and edited by the brilliant Armenian composer Vache Sharafyan. In his arrangement, the added colors of female voices increase the beauty of the work. This version is also concert length, which means that it is appropriately shorter and more accessible than the original.