Eleni Karaindrou

Eleni Karaindrou had been writing music for the films of Theo Angelopoulos for more than 25 years when he made Dust of Time, and this is her score for it. As with her earlier ECM albums of film music, the record is built to stand on its own. The film runs from Stalin's death in 1953 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The album condenses its music into nineteen short, intensely melodic pieces.

The music was recorded in January and March 2008 at the Megaron, the Athens concert hall of the Friends of Music, and edited and mixed in July 2008. Manfred Eicher produced it, cutting about 100 minutes of recorded material down to the 45 minutes heard here, and Karaindrou dedicated the album to him. Violin, cello and harp carry the score, played by Sergiu Nastasa, Renato Ripo and Maria Bildea. Karaindrou notes that all three were born in Romania or Albania and live in Greece, and that the flavour of their own tradition (tsiganiko) permeates their playing. Accordion, oboe, bassoon and horn add colour, with the Camerata and the Greek radio and television orchestra conducted by Alexandros Myrat.

The album is assembled from a few recurring themes heard in several guises. The Dance Theme comes from a film scene of an orchestra rehearsal at the Athens Concert Hall. It appears in two chamber variations and in a full orchestral version with Natalia Michailidou at the piano. Seeking, which Karaindrou associates with the characters' turbulent course through their era, also returns in symphonic and chamber settings. Memories from Siberia gives Ripo's cello the lead, and Waltz by the River leans on the accordion of Dinos Hadjiiordanou.

In Gramophone, Richard Whitehouse called it "Eleni Karaindrou's most subtle and resourceful film score yet", praising the care with which the pieces were placed "so the overall sequence is both cumulative and continuous." Joe Bendel, writing on J.B. Spins in October 2009, found the music "surprisingly effective independent of Angelopoulos's film". The CD came out to coincide with the film's screening at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2009.

CD edition, ECM New Series 2070, first released in February 2009, with a 24-page booklet of stills from the film.