Four works by Sofia Gubaidulina with the double bass at their centre, written and revised over more than forty years. The Italian bassist Daniele Roccato calls them "four gems of outstanding value every double bass player should learn to perform". The programme runs from the theatrical Pantomime of 1966 to the composer's own 2009 versions of In Croce and the Preludes, first written for cello.

Gubaidulina was a Soviet and Russian composer, born in Chistopol in the Tatar Republic in 1931. She studied in Kazan and at the Moscow Conservatory, and died in Appen, Germany, in 2025. Roccato is joined by Fabrizio Ottaviucci on piano in the Sonata and Pantomime, and by Massimiliano Pitocco on bayan in In Croce. The mastering is by Fabrizio De Carolis. Roccato, a double bass soloist and composer, is a co-founder of the Italian double bass ensemble Ludus Gravis; Ottaviucci, born in 1959, is an Italian pianist and composer, and Pitocco an Italian classical accordionist.

In the Sonata for double bass and piano (1975) the bass part is largely written in a traditional way, but the player may choose fingerings, positions and resonating chords. Gubaidulina seems also to count the player's gestures as part of the result. Pantomime (1966) has an immediate theatrical quality, built from melodic contours, dramatic pauses and dynamic swells. The ten Preludes were composed for cello in 1974; in 2009 she arranged nine of them for solo double bass, and they fill twenty minutes here.

In Croce was first written for cello and organ in 1979 and later arranged for cello and bayan in 1991. The third version, for double bass and bayan, dates from 2009 and is the longest piece on the disc at seventeen minutes. The bayan, a Russian button accordion widespread from the early twentieth century, connects with Gubaidulina's own history: in 1975 she founded the group Astreya with Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov to find new forms of improvisation on ancient and folk instruments.

CD, Wergo WER 6760 2, released in 2013, 61 minutes.