Pēteris Vasks - Distant Light; Piano Quartet; Summer Dances (Vadim Gluzman; etc.)

Information

Composer: Pēteris Vasks

• Violin Concerto "Distant Light"
• Summer Dances
• Piano Quartet

Vadim Gluzman, violin

Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra / Hannu Lintu, conductor

Sandis Šteinbergs, violin

Ilze Klava, viola / Reinis Birznieks, cello / Angela Yoffe, piano

Date: 2020

Label: BIS

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Review

Distant Light is surely the most-recorded violin concerto by a living composer, with almost enough versions listed on the streaming site Idagio to warrant a Gramophone Collection. It remains among the most representative of the Latvian composer’s works, with its incantation-like melody built of a distinctly pained, Baltic shape; its clear abstract narrative in which light and love prove victorious over darkness and hate; and its exploration of sonority which sees the music recede to the very edge of audibility while retaining its piercing strength.

Gluzman, who plays Leopold Auer’s erstwhile instrument and has made such wonderfully Slavic-sounding recordings of the Glazunov and Tchaikovsky concertos, brings more fervour, more overt fortitude and a touch more vibrato to the solo line than Renaud Capuçon. But Gluzman is no stranger to Baltic music and the experience pays; his lack of fear does wonders for the work’s pain (he never prettifies), but to my ears he isn’t quite so effective at the moments of transcendent lightness, which don’t float like Capuçon’s (the plateau at the end of the piece is so hard to pull off on a recording), though the Israeli’s impassioned approach to the strain and stress of the cadenzas is effective. Lintu’s swarming orchestra at the end of Cadenza II is typically on-message.

In Summer Dances, the beauty and joy of the Latvian summer is filtered through the sensibility of a composer who tends to laugh even when describing great tribulations and whose music always sees ugliness and beauty as two sides of the same coin. Gluzman and Sandis teinbergs are excellently matched; they play the bookend movement ‘Broadly, sonorously’ as if back to back and the inner movements as if face to face. There is zero showmanship.

Vasks’s 2001 Piano Quartet grapples with the composer’s familiar demons of oppression and a world gone mad, ignorant of nature. The journey isn’t as clear as this composer normally plots it. Resolution doesn’t stick despite being bestowed upon the discourse three times (the unease is unusually marked even for Vasks). It has finger-twisting cadenzas and a beautiful, consoling and long-breathed melody for the first violin, and is thus an excellent companion piece for the concerto on disc. The fugue that takes root during the passacaglia – which is itself sucked into a vortex of striking darkness and power – is one of the most technically interesting things Vasks has done. But the journey is more convoluted than we’ve come to expect from this plain-speaking, clear-headed composer. I guess that’s life.

-- Andrew Mellor, Gramophone

More reviews:
https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/chamber/peteris-vasks-violin-concerto-distant-light-etc

https://www.classicalmusicdaily.com/2020/08/vasks.htm

https://limelight-arts.com.au/reviews/vasks-distant-light-finnish-radio-symphony-orchestra/

https://www.allmusic.com/album/peteris-vasks-distant-light-piano-quartet-summer-dances-mw0003369486

https://www.amazon.com/Distant-Light-Piano-Quartet-Gluzman/dp/B0863TW4Q1

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Pēteris Vasks (born 16 April 1946 in Aizpute, Latvia) is a Latvian composer. He trained as a violinist and a double-bass player and played in several Latvian orchestras before entering the State Conservatory in Vilnius in Lithuania to study composition with Valentin Utkin. He started to become known outside Latvia in the 1990s, when Gidon Kremer started championing his works and now is one of the most influential and praised European contemporary composers. Vasks's compositions incorporate archaic, folklore elements from Latvian music with the language of contemporary music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pēteris_Vasks
https://en.schott-music.com/shop/autoren/peteris-vasks

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Vadim Gluzman (born 1973) is a Ukrainian-born Israeli classical violinist. Gluzman studied with Roman Šnē in Latvia, Zakhar Bron in Russia, Yair Kless in Israel, and Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki in the USA. Early in his career, Gluzman also enjoyed the encouragement and support of Isaac Stern. He has performed with many of the world's leading orchestras, and has recorded or performed live the premieres of works by composers such as Giya Kancheli, Pēteris Vasks, Lera Auerbach and Sofia Gubaidulina. Gluzman plays a 1690 Stradivarius violin known as the "Ex-Leopold Auer".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadim_Gluzman
http://vadimgluzman.com/

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