Golijov / Vasks: Encounter – Arethusa Quartet

Encounter brings together two towering works of contemporary chamber music that speak across cultures, histories, and inner worlds. Osvaldo Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind and Pēteris Vasks’ String Quartet No. 6 arise from profoundly different traditions — Jewish mysticism and Baltic spirituality — yet meet in a shared search for truth, memory, and transcendence. Both works are intensely personal, rooted in lived experience and belief, and animated by music’s power to give voice to what lies beyond words: longing, suffering, hope, and illumination. In this recording, these worlds do not merely coexist; they listen to, reflect, and transform one another.

Performed by the Arethusa Quartet with clarinetist Chen Halevi, Encounter is also a meeting of artistic journeys. Golijov’s ecstatic, ritual-like score unfolds as a spiritual ascent through dreams, prayers, and blindness — understood as deeper inner vision — while Vasks’ Sixth Quartet traces a life’s arc from farewell and remembrance to a final, hushed encounter with transcendence, illuminated by echoes of Beethoven. Across both works, vulnerability and intensity are balanced by stillness and song, darkness by light. What emerges is an album that feels at once intimate and universal: an affirmation of shared humanity, and a reminder of music’s enduring ability to connect past and present, earth and spirit, performer and listener.