Giya Kancheli, Maacha Deubner, Natalia Pschenitschnikova, Catrin Demenga, Ruth Killius, Rebecca Firth, Christian Sutter, Wladimir Jurowski

Exil is a forty-four-minute cycle by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, written in 1994 for soprano, a small group of instruments and tape, and dedicated to Manfred Eicher. It sets Psalm 23, three poems by Paul Celan and a poem by Hans Sahl, two German-language poets whose lives were marked by persecution and exile. The music is slow and sparse, built on long silences and on a cool, restrained soprano line that one reviewer heard as close to chant.

The performers are soprano Maacha Deubner, Natalia Pschenitschnikova on alto and bass flutes, a string group of Catrin Demenga, Ruth Killius, Rebecca Firth and Christian Sutter, and conductor Wladimir Jurowski. The recording was made in May 1994 at the Propstei St. Gerold, with Peter Laenger as engineer and Eicher producing. Celan's poems come from Mohn und Gedächtnis, Die Niemandsrose and Atemwende. Sahl's Exil comes from his late collection Wir sind die Letzten.

The setting of Psalm 23 takes up almost half the disc. It opens with a solo invocation on the alto flute, and the soprano line is sung almost without vibrato. Tapped bows and glassy string harmonics recur through the cycle. The violin enters for the first time in Einmal, the first of three Celan settings with Zähle die Mandeln and Psalm. The writing stays so spare that the work's one sudden outburst lands with real force. In the closing Exil the soprano repeats Sahl's title word, and the pauses weigh as much as the singing.

Reviewing the album in BBC Music Magazine, Helen Wallace found the cycle "hauntingly sincere, with its cool, disengaged chant", while wishing for a grittier sound to match the texts. On ECM Reviews in 2010, Tyran Grillo wrote: "The opening alto flute invocation of Kancheli's setting stills my heart every time." ECM's own page quotes Michael Walsh of Time, who called Kancheli possibly "the most important Soviet composer since Shostakovich". The composer returned to Sahl's poetry on a later New Series album, Lament.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1535, first released in October 1995, with notes by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich and the texts in German with English and French translations.