Peteris Vasks Plainscapes

Latvian composer Peteris Vasks (b. 1946) has earned much international acclaim through his deeply spiritual works of choral music, symphonies and concertos. Vasks list of works also includes several pieces of chamber music. This album by Trio Palladio from Latvia includes Vasks works for the piano trio.

This recording offers an overview of four of Peteris Vasks' most iconic works, from the large scale, dramatic Violin Concerto ‘Distant light’, and the magically dreamy meditation Lonely Angel, to his evocation of Latvian landscape and birdsong Plainscapes and the extatic Dona Nobis Pacem. The first piece by Peteris Vasks that the performer of this album (Daniel Rowland) heard, about a decade ago, was his magnificent Violin Concerto ‘Distant light’, already a modern classic, and Rowland was blown away by the deep emotional impact of this extraordinary music, that seemed to him both wonderfully mysterious, connected to ancient times, touched by a sublime spirituality and at the same time viscerally exciting and with moments of stunning virtuosity.

Encompassing works by Arvo Pärt (Estonia), Pēteris Vasks (Latvia), and James MacMillan (a native of Scotland), this album charts the evolution of choral music in three regions of Northern Europe that saw the rise of a startling new language beginning in the 1980s. Its subsequent development has had far-reaching implications well beyond the staid confines of the house of worship or the serial techniques current at the time. The spiritual focus of this trio of trail-blazers resonates with many of today’s composers, a dimension that has not escaped their listeners or, for that matter, Graham Ross, the enterprising director of music at Clare College, Cambridge.

When he moved away from serial techniques at the end of the 1960s, having undergone something of a spiritual and artistic transformation, Arvo Pärt turned to the choral tradition of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance for inspiration.