Distant Light - Vasks: Vox Amoris, Distant Light & Kancheli: Chiaroscuro

Album review

The cover of this album isn't the clearest but at least the title - Distant Light – is well-chosen. The most legible name is that of Sebastian Bohren - the name of the violinist. The two composers - the Latvian Pēteris Vasks (born a Soviet citizen in 1946) and the Georgian (born a Soviet citizen in 1933), whose names are hardly visible, offer works for violin and orchestra. One of the orchestras, the Georgisches Kammerorchester Ingolstadt, deserves closer attention: it was a wholly "exiled" orchestra – founded in 1964 in Tblisi, it wound up with gear and luggage in Germany in 1990, and set up camp in Ingolstadt, about a hundred kilometres north of Munich. Today, the great majority of the musicians still come from Georgia, or at least from Eastern Europe. Kancheli, like Vasks, has long been working on tonality: Tāla Gaisma – the Distant light in question, a winning and deep work by Vasks (1997) has won him several international prizes; Vox Amoris is a broad field of most intriguing bursts of instrumental brilliance. On the other hand, Chiaroscuro by Kancheli represents, it must be said, something of a neo-soppy, cinematic tendency found among some composers in the post-Soviet world. Note that Kancheli has indeed put his name to a large number of scores for the cinema... © SM/Qobuz