Chiarina co-artistic director Carrie Bean Stute profiles Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks, whose piano trio Lonely Angel is featured on our upcoming concert on May 23.

Born: 1946 in Aizpute, Latvia

Genres of musical compositions: Pretty much everything! Chamber music, orchestral (including concerti), choral, solo instrumental. Most of his works have been recorded.

Accolades: Composer-in-residence at a number of European music festivals, Cannes Classical Award, Grand Music Award of Latvia, Honorary Diploma of the Latvian President, Latvian Great Music award, and more.

Musical style: It’s always hard to put on labels, but his style is a mixture of Baltic minimalism — think, music with sense of unendingness in space and time — and Neoromanticism, i.e., very lyrical and expressive. Much of his music utilizes familiar-sounding triads found in earlier music, particularly in his melodic writing, but he uses these sounds in some very different, unexpected ways.

What makes his music unique? I think the symbolic subtexts in Vasks’s music are what makes it so special and compelling. He writes with stark dramatic contrasts—say, a thickly-textured section of chaotic and dissonant music that then elides into a long-arched, singable melody in the minor mode. Such contrasts are not just a musical exercise, but are in fact symbolic of larger themes. 

What kinds of themes? Well, certainly a longing for freedom—freedom of thought, artistic freedom, a more unadulterated kind of human existence—was a frequent, sometimes understated, theme in Vasks’s music, particularly early on in his career while Latvia was still a Soviet state. (It became an independent nation in 1990-91.) Vasks also reflects on the natural world, and man’s relationship with it. For example, he incorporations birdsong into some works. And many of his pieces have titles with some kind of spiritual or eschatological implication—like Lonely Angel, which we’re performing this month.

Does Vasks say any of this in his own words? Sure. Here’s a quotation from the composer that expresses the idea pretty well:

“Music is the most powerful of all the muses,

since it reaches the divine most easily.

Yes, music is an abstraction, but sounds are able to express the spirit.

That cannot be expressed in words.

All around me the flesh is spoken about,

but I want to shout: Where is the spirit, the soul?

Souls are as overgrown as the jungle.

That is why in my sounds I try to uphold a beam of light.”

Want to hear more? Here are a few of my favorite pieces.

String Quartet No. 3:

From Cello Concerto No. 2:

From Voices, Symphony for Strings: