Last year I reviewed the Latvian Radio Choir and Sigvards Kļava’s award-winning disc of choral music by John Cage. I hadn’t known what to expect – but it was a revelation and deserved its acclaim. With this new album they are back on home turf, singing music by Baltic composers, some known to me and some not, all the pieces in premiere recordings. The best known is Pēteris Vasks, who has two tracks: the stunningly poised and luminous Angele Dei which opens proceedings, sung with wondrously long-breathed phrases, and the somewhat less memorable Actus Caritatis. They are both in Vasks’ familiar rich tonal style, and his spiritual, contemplative mode is found in several of the pieces, even where their musical language leans more to the avant-garde.
More sonically adventurous than the Vasks is Krists Auznieks’ Sensus, a large-scale piece with rich chromatic harmony, glissandos and other effects, solo voices emerging from the chordal texture to sing phrases from St Paul. It is very striking, and virtuosically sung. Where these other tracks are predominantly about harmony, Ruta Paidere’s Magnificat focuses on melody. But not conventional western melody, rather incantatory lines that embrace Jewish synagogue chant in a dense polyphonic web.
As with Vasks, there are two pieces by Andris Dzenitis. Om, Lux Aeterna from 2012 combines echoes of Russian Orthodox church music with the strangeness of John Cage, the gravelly low basses really excelling, while Prayer is a simple, humble hymn in which time stands still. As it does in Mārtiņš Viļums’ The Fate of King Lear’s Children, an example of the technique he dubs “microsonorism”. It is peculiar, spacious like the Vasks but much more unsettling, archaic and monumental, dramatic in an unshowy way. Conductor Sigvards Kļava wants this album to mark the state of Latvian music today. It does this not only in terms of the range of composers represented, but also in the quality of the choral singing by a national choir the nation can be proud of.
Bernard Hughes
www.theartsdesk.com, 31/08/2024
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Superb choral singing, extraordinarily immaginative writing for voices. Mind expanding sounds, remarkably controlled singing and the acoustics of St Johns Church in Riga framing everything.
Andrew Mellor
BBC Radio 3 Record Review, 31/08/2024
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