Pēteris Vasks (b. 1946) is considered among the leading Baltic composers of today and is known for his profound musical language. The award-winning Latvian Radio Choir conducted by Sigvards Kļava are dedicating their new album to Pēteris Vasks’ 80th birthday this year. The choir performs several world premiere recordings of Pēteris Vasks’ choral music, including newly written works for the choir, as well as Vasks’ earliest choral composition, dating from 1961. All of the composer’s favoured themes find fertile ground in these works: pantheistic faith, love, silence and homeland. Essentially tonal and diatonic, slow-moving, homophonic and syllabic, fluid and linear, they possess a discreet grace and a fragile luminosity.

Although Pēteris Vasks regards himself primarily as a composer of instrumental music, his choral works have enjoyed considerable success in his homeland. Sadly, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, sacred music was strictly forbidden, and any other form of vocal music was acceptable only after passing through the censors’ gauntlet. From the 1970s onwards, Vasks therefore wrote little vocal music, and virtually no sacred music, for more than two decades. Until the mid-1980s, no sacred music rooted in the Christian tradition was performed at concerts organised by the Latvian Composers’ Union. The Latvian Radio Choir was among the few ensembles willing to champion a composer considered persona non grata by the regime and undeterred by his innovative language. The programme for this recording, conceived as a tribute to Pēteris Vasks on his eightieth birthday, spans a period of more than half a century and focuses on his intimate a cappella choral works in which he employs a simple, languid and deliberately conventional musical language.