The masks and social distancing evident from the booklet photos tell you this recording was made since March even before you check the session dates (June 2020). If Vasks’s Distant Light had felt pertinent back then, it does even more now, with a vaccine for the disease that is tearing our civilisation apart beginning to roll out. A better world is on the horizon, Vasks’s violin concerto promises us.

This is a heartfelt, rooted performance of the piece from the Munich Radio Orchestra and its concertmaster that may well prove a front runner in a field more competitive than that of any other concerto by a living composer. There is a strong sense of narrative sound from Repušić’s orchestra but also from Madić, whose control of vibrato and tone colour ranges from nervous intensity to still radiance. The cantabile movements retreat without exactly relaxing, the cadenzas are determinedly articulate and the overall power is cumulative more than choreographed. The difficult-to-record ending comes off well.

Sound is embracing and clear, engendered partly by the spatial effect of the regulation two-metre distance between players. Does that bring something extra special to the other two string-only works here? I suspect it might, especially in Viatore, which pits a ‘wandering’ theme against an ‘eternal’ chorale. This performance grows into itself, but allows the precision to generate the passion.

Vasks’s Symphony No 1 was written as the Soviet Union fell, a journey from silence and back into it, whose concern over an environmental catastrophe in the extensive middle movement proves that Vasks has never been one to celebrate short-term gains. Like so much Vasks, it calls on a chorale theme that emerges in the first movement and returns in the last. In between, the torso of the work teems with animal life (this orchestra and its producers capture a ‘swarming’ string sound very well indeed), slipping into overproduction, overwork and a world gone mad. One of the remedies is a very Baltic cadence in which the ensemble is spatchcocked in contrary motion towards a luminous chord, another moment caught wondrously by Bavarian Radio. Recommended as a string-only immersion in Vasks’s world, a competitive account of his most famous work or just something to keep you going until the light actually returns.