Alexander Knaifel, Ivan Monighetti, Tatiana Melentieva, Piotr Migunov, State Hermitage Orchestra, Lege Artis Choir

Blazhenstva is the third ECM album given to the Russian composer Alexander Knaifel, after Amicta Sole (2003) and Svete Tikhiy (2005). It pairs two works that could hardly sound more different: a furious early piece for solo cello and a slow, almost silent setting of the Beatitudes. Knaifel called them two stages of one path, and both are linked to the figure of Mstislav Rostropovich, his teacher and mentor.

The central performer is Ivan Monighetti, Rostropovich's last student at the Moscow Conservatory, who here plays cello and piano and conducts. The soloists in Blazhenstva are soprano Tatiana Melentieva and bass Piotr Migunov, with the State Hermitage Orchestra and the Lege Artis Choir under its artistic director Boris Abalian. The recordings were made in March 2006 at St. Catherine Lutheran Church and the Capella Concert Hall in St. Petersburg. Knaifel took part in every stage of the production and called it one of the best recordings he had made.

Knaifel trained as a cellist, and Lamento uses that knowledge. Written in 1967 while he was a student in Leningrad, it was revised in 1987 and dedicated to the memory of the choreographer Leonid Jakobson. Over eighteen minutes it moves from heavy, almost orchestral double-stopped chords to glacial harmonics and a quiet close, where the player is asked to hum with closed mouth in the cello's register. Blazhenstva (1996) was Knaifel's gift for Rostropovich's 70th birthday. It sets the Sermon on the Mount in Russian for solo voices and choral groups, with long string interludes. The score is slow and quiet throughout, about 37 minutes that often verge on silence.

In Gramophone, Richard Whitehouse traced the work from soprano and bass over sparse piano chords to a final section where "the cello is gradually left alone in musing introspection." He left it to each listener to decide whether the piece is meant to be heard once or often, and found performance and recording involving. Peter Quinn, in International Record Review, set it beside Pärt's Für Alina and Silvestrov's Silent Songs and heard "a crystalline beauty and hypnotic power." He described the opening of Lamento as "tearing a hole in the surrounding silence."

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1957, released on 26 September 2008, with notes by the composer in Russian and English.