Alexander Knaifel, Mstislav Rostropovich, Tatiana Melentieva, Boy Choir Glinka Choral College, State Hermitage Orchestra, Arkady Shteinlukht

Amicta Sole is the second ECM New Series album devoted to the Russian composer Alexander Knaifel, after Svete Tikhiy. Like that disc it holds two long works, which he describes as "quiet giants": Psalm 51 (50) for solo cello, played by its dedicatee Mstislav Rostropovich, and Amicta Sole (Clothed with the Sun), written for the soprano Tatiana Melentieva, the composer's wife. Both develop so gradually that time seems to slow down around them.

Knaifel studied cello with Rostropovich in Moscow in the 1960s, before a hand injury ended his playing. The Psalm was recorded in September 2001 at the Propstei St. Gerold, with Stephan Schellmann as engineer. Amicta Sole was recorded in July 2000 at St. Catherine Lutheran Church in St. Petersburg, with soloists of the boy choir of the Glinka Choral College, the State Hermitage Orchestra and the conductor Arkady Shteinlukht. Manfred Eicher produced the album.

In Psalm 51 the cellist plays "as if singing", intoning the Russian text of the psalm syllable by syllable for twenty minutes. Knaifel explained the choice of player plainly: "I had the feeling that only Rostropovich could articulate this text." The chant-like phrases begin on fragments of a D major scale, climb, sink into the low register and finally thin out at the top of the instrument. Amicta Sole takes its title from the woman clothed with the sun in the Book of Revelation. Here the roles are reversed: Melentieva's voice floats over boys' voices and slow strings, while the orchestral players are asked to sound the texts as if singing them.

The album entered the Bestenliste 2/2005 of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik. On ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo wrote of the Psalm that "only at the end does light creep in, pulling ever higher into the cello's very threshold of audibility." Daniel Jaffé in BBC Music Magazine admired the floating quality of Rostropovich's tone, while warning that this music asks for patience from the listener. In Fono Forum, Andreas Obst linked Knaifel's sound to the "standing now" of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, an image of time as endless tone close to silence.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1731, released in February 2005.