Pēteris Vasks - Oboe Concerto; Vēstījums; Lauda (Albrecht Mayer; Andris Poga)

Information

Composer: Pēteris Vasks

• Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra
• Message (Vēstījums)
• Lauda

Albrecht Mayer, oboe

Latvian National Symphony Orchestra

Andris Poga, conductor

Date: 2021

Label: Ondine

https://www.ondine.net/index.php?lid=en&cid=2.2&oid=6776

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Review

A lot changed in Latvia between the early 1980s and the late 2010s. So, therefore, did the music of the composer most tightly bound to the nation’s idea of itself.

One constant is nature. Vēstījums (‘Message’) for two pianos, percussion and string orchestra was effectively Pēteris Vasks’s first large-scale work. A sort of earth cry, the piece rails against man’s hubris in the face of nature’s beauty, culminating in a swarm of dissonance.

If that could have been read as an allegory for Soviet occupation in 1983 Riga, the 20-minute orchestral slab Lauda of two years later would prove rather less subtle. Its context was the outpouring of expression that year to mark 150 years since the birth of the Latvian folklorist Krišjānis Barons, which blossomed into a sort of candle-bearing spiritual protest that some say set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the Singing Revolution.

From its alto flute induction, Lauda builds (in typically Vasks-like waves) to a scorching aleatoric climax. The ending is no less typical. After a period of rest, the piece signs off on an upward glissando like a plume of smoke ascending and disappearing.

Three decades later, the pain of Latvia and its people is receding into memory. Vasks’s Oboe Concerto for Albrecht Mayer is a pastoral and mostly major-key affair, compared by the composer to ‘a human life with its beginning, period of maturity and departure’. The finale has some grit, clawing upwards in an unmistakably Vasks-like manner (and a minor key) before a calm coda suggests new life hatching out (another upwards swoon ends the piece). There’s something Ivesian in the central Scherzando’s gathering up of plenteous activity over a folk-song cantus firmus.

Before both, riffing on Latvian folk melodies, the concerto’s opening movement seems uncharacteristically nonchalant. ‘This is what my country sounds like’, says Vasks, but it sounds a lot like Vaughan Williams’s middle England. Mayer plays it smoothly and suavely, but I’m drawn to the conclusion that Vasks is at his best when the chips are down.

-- Andrew Mellor, Gramophone

More reviews:

https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2021/Oct/Vasks-oboe-ODE13552.htm

https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2021/Nov/Vasks-oboe-ODE13552.htm

https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/concerto/peteris-vasks-oboe-concerto-vestijums-lauda

https://www.allmusic.com/album/peteris-vasks-oboe-concerto-vestijums-lauda-mw0003564359

https://www.thewholenote.com/index.php/booksrecords2/moderncontempo/31379-peteris-vasks-oboe-concerto-vestijums-lauda-albrecht-mayer-latvian-national-symphony-orchestra-andris-poga

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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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Albrecht Mayer (born 3 June 1965 in Erlangen, Bavaria) is a German classical oboist and conductor. He was a student of Gerhard Scheuer, Georg Meerwein, Maurice Bourgue and Ingo Goritzki, and began his professional career as principal oboist for the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in 1990. He joined the Berlin Philharmonic as principal oboist in 1992, a position he currently holds together with Jonathan Kelly. Mayer plays with ensembles of the Philharmonic, the Berliner Philharmonisches Bläserensemble and the Berlin Philharmonic Winds Soloists, amongst other chamber music ensembles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_Mayer

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Andris Poga (born 29 June 1980 in in Riga) is a Latvian orchestral conductor. Poga is a graduate of the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, where he studied trumpet and conducting. He also studied conducting at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Poga was artistic director and principal conductor of the Professional Symphonic Band Rīga (2007-10), then assistant conductor to Paavo Järvi at Orchestre de Paris (2011-14). He became music director of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra in 2013, and is currently chief conductor of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andris_Poga

https://www.andrispoga.com/

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