Anu Tali conducted the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in this concert of Baltic music, presenting two works by her fellow Estonians Arvo Pärt and Eduard Tubin, the man who, a generation before Pärt’s emergence as such a cult figure, had been his country’s most important composer.
Pärt’s Fratres exists in different versions, but the one for string orchestra carries the greatest impact. Here the punctuation of the wood block’s knocking rhythm – heard in unison with the more resonant bass drum – was an arresting counterbalance to the series of hymn-like repetitions, while the overall arc created from hushed opening through swelling sound and back to quiet had its own mesmeric aura.
Sinfonia Lirica is the subtitle of Tubin’s Fourth Symphony, and the sweeping melodic flow that is indeed its main characteristic was exploited to the full by Tali and her players. The work is curious for betraying little of the trauma of the time it was written, 1942-43, when Estonia was occupied by Soviet Russia. Moments in more reflective vein are somehow abandoned as Tubin escapes back into lyricism, almost to the point of overindulgence.
The strongest impression was made by the Latvian violinist Baiba Skride, who played the concerto Distant Light by her compatriot Peteris Vasks. In a deeply instinctive interpretation, Skride brought to the high sustained lines a searing beauty and a brilliant vitality to the three testing cadenzas. She realised, too, the sense of struggle, both elemental and internal, that Vasks’s work embraces. In the final resolution, Skride and Tali found an ethereal quality and the stillness which enveloped the hall was itself testimony to a moving performance.
