Songs of my Heart

Peteris Vasks (born in 1946) is one of the leading contemporary Baltic composers and is known for his profound musical language. The award-winning Latvian Radio Choir under the direction of Sigvards Klava dedicates its new album this year to the 80th birthday of Peteris Vasks. The choir presents various world premieres of Peteris Vasks' choral music, including newly composed works for choir and Vasks' earliest choral composition from 1961. All the composer's favorite themes find fertile ground in these works: pantheistic faith, love, silence and home. Essentially tonal and diatonic, slow, homophonic and syllabic, flowing and linear, they possess restrained grace and fragile clarity. Although Peteris Vasks sees himself primarily as a composer of instrumental music, his choral works have been very successful in his homeland. Unfortunately, sacred music was strictly forbidden until the collapse of the Soviet Union, and any other form of vocal music was only permitted after passing censorship. From the 1970s onwards, Vasks therefore wrote almost no vocal music and almost no sacred music for more than two decades. The Latvian Radio Choir was one of the few ensembles willing to stand up for a composer who was regarded by the regime as persona non grata and was not deterred by his innovative language. The program of this recording, conceived as a tribute to Peteris Vasks on his eightieth birthday, spans a period of more than half a century and focuses on his intimate a cappella choral works. The Latvian Radio Choir (LRC) is one of Europe's leading professional chamber choirs and has established itself as a renowned force on the world map thanks to its refined taste for musical material, its expressive finesse and its incredibly broad vocal range. The repertoire of the LRC ranges from Renaissance music to the most demanding scores of modern