Hyperion Records

The Latvian Maija Einfelde has a somewhat pessimistic world-view: ‘Life is not that beautiful, that I would be able to write beautiful music.’ Yet her music is beautiful, in its dark luminosity and austere concentration; it often bears a sorrowful countenance, but speaks of a great and compelling humanity.

The daughter of an organ-builder and an organist, Einfelde was born in Valmiera, near the Estonian border, where she felt the horrors of the Soviet occupation particularly deeply. Always something of an outsider in Latvian music she has patiently and painstakingly gone her own way, finally gaining international recognition in 1997 when she won the Barlow Endowment for Music competition for her Aeschylus cantata Pie zemes talas … (‘At the Edge of the Earth…’).

Written in 2003 Cikls ar Frica Bardas dzeju (‘A cycle of Fricis Barda poems’) comprises three settings of one of Latvia’s best-loved writers. Barda, who died in 1919 at the age of thirty-nine, was one of a group of poets who turned their back on realism in favour of a higher synthesis of romanticism and naturalism. Einfelde responds to these pantheistic miniatures with music of quiet integrity and intensity, the shifting modal harmony flecked with chromaticism, the choral textures immaculately sifted and weighed. Here there is no obvious word-illustration, no overt drama, for like the Latvian landscape this is music painted in ‘grey, green, brown and the colour of the sun’.

from notes by Gabriel Jackson © 2010