Anthony Marwood has championed the Vasks over a number of years and delivers a wonderfully moving and intense performance of the solo part. The strings of the Academy of St Martins in the Fields are responsive partners maintaining a tight grip over the musical argument but without sacrificing any element of poetry. Their colleagues in the wind, brass and percussions departments prove equally adept in the spiky passage work of the Weill, and the lack of a separate conductor doesn't inhibit Marwood from extracting the maximum degree of virtuosity and sensitivity from Weill's knotty writing. ...a very special disc indeed.

This new account of Vasks's Distant Light swells the number of recordings it has garnered to five, an amazing statistic for a work premiered as recently as August 1997. Then again, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised: the Latvian's music speaks without artifice and offers an enticing blend of unspoilt beauty, compassionate heartache and superior compositional craft. Of all the competing versions, Gidon Kremer's pioneering Teldec reading has a charisma, intensity and concentration that are wholly arresting. More's the pity it has been deleted, so head-of-the-pack status must now pass to this excellently engineered newcomer. Anthony Marwood keeps a tight grip on the structural tiller and plays with exquisite polish and intimacy of feeling; he also secures an exceptionally alert and involving contribution from his Academy forces.
Winds, percussion and double basses assemble for the coupling, Kurt Weill's ambitious early Violin Concerto of 1923-24, which receives as persuasive and vital a performance as any. Marwood and company quarry every ounce of bony lyricism and spooky burlesque from what can initially seem a rather dry, unyielding creation.
Again, the sound is vividly realistic (if lacking just a whisker in bite and focus), and the disc as a whole certainly bodes well for Marwood's tenure as artistic director of the Irish CO.