Valentin Silvestrov, Alexei Lubimov, Münchener Kammerorchester, Christoph Poppen

Bagatellen und Serenaden is a portrait of the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, issued by ECM in September 2007, in time for his 70th birthday. It sets the composer alone at the piano beside his recent music for strings, all written between 1996 and 2005. The piano half came about by chance. During the orchestral sessions it was decided on the spot to record Silvestrov playing his own pieces, early in the morning and late in the afternoon.

Everything was recorded in February 2006 at the Himmelfahrtskirche in Munich-Sendling, with Stephan Schellmann as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Christoph Poppen conducts the Münchener Kammerorchester in the string works. In Der Bote and Zwei Dialoge mit Nachwort the pianist is Alexei Lubimov, who, in ECM's words, again reveals his deep affinity with Silvestrov's music. Several scores carry dedications: Stille Musik to Eicher, Zwei Dialoge mit Nachwort to Arvo Pärt, Abschiedsserenade to Ivan Karabits, Der Bote to Larissa Bondarenko.

The thirteen Bagatellen of 2005, followed by a distant variant of the second, run for about 34 minutes as a single sequence. The pedal blurs one miniature into the next, and echoes of Romantic piano music surface and fade at a very low dynamic. The second half moves from the more anguished Elegie to the three dances of Stille Musik and the two-part Abschiedsserenade. Der Bote (1996), for strings and piano, builds its title figure from a Mozart melody and an 18th-century sonatina, as Gerhard Rohde explained in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He heard the whole programme played with fine sensitivity to sound.

Gramophone heard the Bagatelles as miniatures that seep into one another. It recommended the disc as "an ideal résumé of one aspect" of Silvestrov's creativity, adding that it was not necessarily the lighter one. The same review singled out Lubimov's careful playing in Der Bote. Writing in Audiophile Audition in September 2007, John Sunier gave the album five stars and compared the bagatelles to Schumann's miniatures. Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews later called Der Bote the centrepiece of the album.

CD edition, ECM New Series 1988, first released in September 2007. The booklet contains an essay by Tatjana Frumkis, in German and in English translation by J. Bradford Robinson.