Musica serena

With his Musica serena, Pēteris Vasks honours his long-standing friend and Finnish conductor Juha Kangas on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Since the early 1990s, Kangas has conducted the premieres of many of Vasks’ numerous works for string orchestra with his own Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. The seven-minute Musica serena spans a wide dynamic range, building up from softly shimmering violin harmonics in the ‘Andante cantabile’ to the central ff of the ‘Maestoso’, gradually regaining its calm in the pp leading into the harmonic notes of the work’s beginning.