This very fine record from Deutsche Grammophon showcases women of Lithuania. Composer Raminta Šerkšnytė learned orchestration from Verklärte Nacht by Schoenberg and Strauss's Metamorphosen. But her writing is less contrapunctual and seems to owe much to the harmonic thought of musicians like Janacek or even Pärt.
Midsummer Song presents itself like a concert piece, in which the power of the solo violin irradiates the whole orchestra. The composer exploits the expressive force of the high string notes that make the playing sparkle (the glissandos in particular). The discourse moves on through great diaphanous harmonic tracks whose tensions, softened by an orchestral treatment that fuses timbres and stretches time, resolving into soft consonances, crowned by the solo violin. This lyricism is all the more touching as the Kremerata Baltica is a chamber orchestra: every bit as powerful as a symphonic orchestra, it also has the more balanced charm of smaller formations.
The De Profundis brings in a more dramatic discourse which surges back to power the arrival of the voices, a choir and a very fine vocal quartet (Night). The text of Rabindranath Tagore's Indian raga emerges from the orchestra in a ductile intermingling of voices, often in the manner of Gregorian melismas, or more homophonic writing. The score, full as it is of contrasts, juxtaposes episodes and presents a richly textured orchestral tapestry which foregrounds a cyclical ordering of musical time.
Whether in Weinberg's forgotten scores that she recorded with Gidon Kremer, or the lesser-known works of his compatriot Raminta Šerkšnytė, the young conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla gives a passionate treatment of this music and shows us here, with the marvellous Kremerata Baltica, the powerful poetry of the Lithuanian repertoire. © Elsa Siffert/Qobuz