Alexei Lubimov

Der Bote is a recital of ten elegies for piano by Alexei Lubimov, running across three centuries from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to John Cage and Valentin Silvestrov. Lubimov described the programme as a "quiet meditation". The composers' lives could hardly be more different, yet he ordered the pieces so that they echo, connect and contrast with one another. The sequence closes with Silvestrov's title work, Der Bote ("The Messenger").

The album was recorded in December 2000 at Radio Studio DRS in Zürich and released in May 2002. Manfred Eicher produced it and Peter Laenger was the engineer. The booklet carries a foreword by Lubimov himself, with essays by Ivan Moody and Peter Cossé. In that foreword he names melancholy, nostalgic pictures and quiet meditation as the threads of the programme. Between the outer pieces stand works by Tigran Mansurian, Franz Liszt, Mikhail Glinka, Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy and Béla Bartók, together with a second Silvestrov piece, his Elegie.

The longest work, C.P.E. Bach's Fantasia in F sharp minor, known as C.P.E. Bachs Empfindungen, opens the disc at almost twelve minutes, its dreamy opening broken by sudden virtuoso outbursts. Lubimov takes Cage's In a Landscape lightly and at a faster pace than Herbert Henck's earlier ECM version, which runs about four minutes longer. Glinka's Nocturne La séparation and Chopin's Prelude in C sharp minor, Op. 45 sit side by side at the centre, and Bartók's first Klagelied leads into the closing piece. Silvestrov wrote Der Bote in 1996, after the sudden death of his wife, the musicologist Larysa Bondarenko. Its title comes from the philosopher Yakov Druskin, and its Mozartian phrases are marked in the score as if enveloped in mist.

The New Yorker placed it among the most distinctive discs of 2002, and Fono Forum named it Stern des Monats. In The New Yorker, Russell Platt wrote that "Lubimov's performances are so hauntingly persuasive that each one seems indispensable." Geoff Brown in The Times found C.P.E. Bach's fantasia among the strangest pieces on the disc, and heard the Silvestrov title piece as one that "sounds like drowned Mozart." Gramophone's Richard Whitehouse also recommended it warmly.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1771, first released in 2002.