Robert R. Reilly:
"Contemporary composers are increasingly unafraid to write attractive, even beautiful music. Further evidence of this proposition, which I have advanced in other columns, comes from the lands of northern lights in the works of Latvian composer Peteris Vasks and Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara.

Vasks writes traditional tonal music of soulful beauty that both laments the suffering of his country and celebrates its enduring spirit. Rautavaara, on the other hand, seems to have wandered through a number of schools of composition, including twelve-tone, and emerged as, of all things, a late twentieth-century Romantic. Each has been favored by a pair of recent releases, from Conifer and Ondine respectively, that shows them to great advantage. Anyone who thinks modern classical music always sounds either like an explosion in a boiler factory or sonic wallpaper should listen to the music on these CDs.

The son of a Baptist minister, Peteris Vasks (b. 1946) was not favored for a musical education or career in the Soviet Union. Yet discrimination had its advantages. As Vasks said, “we had the tradition of living music at home and in the church.” Though he studied at the music conservatory in Riga, he is largely self-taught. The results are very intriguing: music that is so obviously attractive it is almost embarrassing. His Cantabile for strings is the Latvian equivalent of Samuel Barber’s hugely popular and moving Adagio for Strings. Cantabile was written in 1979, not a particularly pleasant time for Latvia.Vasks’s goal was “to tell in eight minutes how beautiful and harmonious the world is.” Why so beautiful? Contrary to our century’s predominant aesthetic of ugliness in art to reflect ugliness in life, Vasks feels the urgent need to combat that ugliness. He seems to share the Dostoevskian belief that “beauty will save the world.” Thus the uglier life becomes, the more insistently beautiful his music is. This is not Pollyanna-ish. The unalloyed beauty he creates springs from a deep spiritual need for it; he chooses it over darkness. Vasks asks, “Is there any point in composing a piece that only mirrors our being one step away from extinction? To my mind, every honest composer searches for a way out of the crises of his times—toward affirmation and faith.” Beauty is the language of affirmation and faith.

This language was also Vasks’s only weapon in facing Soviet totalitarianism. His Cello Concerto depicts “the persistence of a personality against crude, brutal power; what totalitarian power did to us, how we are to purge ourselves from this
manipulation.” The introductory Canto I depicts “the ideal beauty of the world.”
The next movement unleashes a frenzied staccato rhythm that attacks the soloist. Vasks says, “Fast music has always been to me a negative sign of evil, aggression,
destruction.” The massed orchestra tries to crush the cello with a vulgar tune it repeats with ferocity in what sounds like a nightmare at a circus. The cello survives and recovers its lyrical rhapsodic voice in the last movement, the achingly lovely Canto II, which Vasks says represents the alternative to what precedes it, as well as “the spiritual steadfastness of my people.”

Also unabashedly beautiful is Vasks’s String Symphony—Voices, inspired in part by the last-ditch Soviet clampdown in the Baltic states in 1990. At the very beginning of the first movement, subtitled “Voices of Silence,” Vasks creates a most intriguing sound, as if the wind were stirring the orchestra, gently rustling the instruments like they were so many leaves. This is followed by what sounds like a tribute to, if indeed not a quotation from, Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa. The movement is full of crepuscular murmurings in the strings. “Voices of Life” begins with birdcalls gently rising with the dawn of a new day. For Vasks, birds are emblems of freedom. This movement carries with it a marvelous sense of expectancy. That expectancy is met in the concluding movement, the gravely beautiful “Voices of Conscience.” Voices is one of the most beautiful string pieces I have heard. It and Cantabile strike me as music I have somehow always known without ever having heard it before. I return to these pieces often for that wonderful amalgam of mystery and familiarity. These works should join those of Britten, Vaughan Williams, Barber, and Diamond as among the finest of our time. Of the other compositions on the Conifer CDs, I am particularly taken with the lovely Cor anglais Concerto, with its Sibelian touches, and the heartfelt Musica doloroso. All are movingly performed by the Riga Philharmonic under conductors Kriss Rusmanis and Jonas Aleksa."

CRISIS Politics, Culture and Church, October 1997