Alfred Schnittke, Giya Kancheli, Kim Kashkashian, Dennis Russell Davies

This disc pairs two large works for viola and orchestra by composers of the late Soviet era, the Georgian Giya Kancheli and Alfred Schnittke. Kancheli's Vom Winde beweint and Schnittke's Viola Concerto were both written with the violist Yuri Bashmet in mind. Here the solo part belongs to Kim Kashkashian, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting, and the two scores make a natural pair, both long, mostly slow and shadowed by mourning.

The album joins two sessions recorded more than five years apart. The Schnittke was taped in May 1986 at the Saarländischer Rundfunk in Saarbrücken, with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken, as a co-production between ECM and the radio station, with Helmut David as engineer. The Kancheli followed in November 1991 at the Beethovenhalle in Bonn with the Orchester der Beethovenhalle Bonn, engineered by Peter Laenger. Manfred Eicher produced both and remixed them with Laenger. The booklet carries texts by Wilfrid Mellers, Wolfgang Sandner and Kancheli himself.

Kancheli called Vom Winde beweint (Mourned by the Wind) a liturgy for large orchestra and solo viola, and dedicated it to the memory of the Georgian musicologist Givi Ordzhonikidze. Its four movements open with a hard blow of piano chords, out of which the viola emerges alone before the orchestra slowly gathers around it. The music then moves between long, nearly static stretches and sudden brass eruptions, and it ends almost inaudibly. Schnittke's concerto reverses the usual order, placing an Allegro molto between two slow movements marked Largo. He completed it in July 1985, about ten days before suffering his first stroke. The central movement is a frantic chase in which a harpsichord adds a strange, antique colour, and the long final Largo closes on a bare dissonant double stop.

Reviewing the disc in BBC Music Magazine, Annette Morreau called Kashkashian's Schnittke "passionate and at times dangerously abandoned" and felt that the brisk tempos sharpened the work's irony and bleakness. She heard the Kancheli as a melancholy relative of the music of Pärt and Górecki. Tyran Grillo, writing in Between Sound and Space in 2010, called the album "a benchmark recording in all respects."

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1471, released in October 1992 with a 40-page booklet.