String Quartets No.1, No.2 & No.3
Miami String Quartet, Conifer 75605 51334

Barry Witherden:
"Almost unknown outside Latvia five years ago, lately Vasks has been fairly well served by record companies, notably by this fine Conifer series and I Fiamminghi's admirable survey on Telarc. A wide range of his music is now available, but every release shows there is still much to learn about this work.
These quartets are as rich in influence, as fertile in ideas, as ambiguous in emotions, as complex in meaning as we have come to expect. Although not usually cited as one of his models, I always thought I detected echoes of Shostakovich's melodic approach in some of Vasks's symphonic works, and there are passages here which seem to confirm the connection. This is only right and proper. On this evidence, Vasks is a worthy scion of the dynasty which stretches back through Bartok, Beethoven and Schubert as well as Shostakovich, but his ideas are as deeply rooted in Latvian tradition as in the classic string quartet literature.
The Miami String Quartet plays with conviction, from the claustrophobic intensity of the first quartet to the more expansive melancholy of the slow movements in the other two."

Classic CD, June 1999, page 102