ALEXANDER KNAIFEL Lukomoriye

The fourth New Series album from Russian composer Alexander Knaifel may be his most wide-ranging to date, voyaging from the sacred to the secular and back again via several inspired detours. It includes two Prayers to the Holy Spirit, movingly performed by the Lege Artis Choir. The composer’s wife, Tatiana Melentieva, sings Bliss, based on Alexander Pushkin’s poem, and the great Russian poet is cross-referenced with St Ephraim the Syrian in O Lord of All My Life (A Poem and a Prayer) sung by Piotr Migunov. Oleg Malov, one of Alexander Knaifel’s closest associates for more than thirty years, accompanies both singers and is called upon to internalize texts - playing as if singing, a Knaifel speciality - in four further solo piano pieces. A mad tea party lives up to its title, with a surreal Alice in Wonderland spirit. This Child (after the Gospel of St Luke), A Confession and title piece Lukomoriye (both after Pushkin) are luminously quiet, and quietly magical. The scope of the musical material – by turns playful, devotional, lyrical – defies typecasting, just as it testifies to Kanifel’s eclectic imagination. “The music comes from up there,” Knaifel has said, pointing skyward, “what’s important for a composer is to listen to it, and get it down on paper.”

Alexander Knaifel was born in 1943 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, but grew up in St. Petersburg. His music, described by the Frankfurter Rundschau as "one of the most important revelations of recent years", belongs to that circle of near-contemporaries and associates from the former Soviet lands which includes Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov and Sofia Gubaidulina. But, although critics have found echoes of Pärt, Tavener and Górecki in Knaifel’s quest for musical beauty, he has an idiom that is entirely his own, with its own expressive power.

ECM’s documentation of Knaifel’s work began with Svete Tikhiy (recorded 1997 and 2000), with the Keller Quartet, pianist Oleg Malov, and Tatiana Melentieva. Amicta Sole, recorded 2000 to 2001, featured the great Mstislav Rostropovich, who had been Knaifel’s cello teacher at the Moscow Conserbatory; Rostropovich was subsequently the dedicatee of the 2006 recording Blazhenstva, which also featured The Lege Artis Choir. (ECM Records)