Giya Kancheli, Gidon Kremer, Maacha Deubner, Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra, Jansug Kakhidze

Lament is a single forty-two-minute work for violin, soprano and orchestra by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, subtitled Music of Mourning in Memory of Luigi Nono. Kancheli and Luigi Nono admired each other's music and were planning a joint work when Nono died in 1990. The solo part was written for Gidon Kremer, who leads the mourning through long stretches of near-silence broken by sudden orchestral violence.

The recording was made in March 1998 at the Centre for Music and Culture in Tbilisi, with the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra under Jansug Kakhidze. The soprano is Maacha Deubner, who had already sung on Kancheli's Exil and Caris Mere for ECM New Series. Mikhail Kilosanidze engineered the sessions and Manfred Eicher produced them. The booklet includes a portfolio of photographs from the recording days in Tbilisi and an essay by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich.

The sung text comes from Strophen (Stanzas) by the German poet Hans Sahl, taken from his memoir Das Exil im Exil; Sahl's verses had also been the basis of Exil. The piece unfolds in episodes, with Sahl's lines set between instrumental passages. Kremer's violin emerges from shadow and a flute joins it as a guide, while the orchestra answers with agitated outbursts that dissolve back into the texture. Violin and soprano meet at a high point, an oboe enters later, and the final line of the poem stands alone at the close.

In BBC Music Magazine Andrew Clements gave the album five stars. He found the raw materials simple and the cumulative effect very powerful, and noted that although Kancheli's language is far from Nono's, its fragmented surfaces come close to the world of Nono's late works. Writing on ECM Reviews in 2010, Tyran Grillo heard the work as "a requiem, a postlude, a concerto, and homage". ECM's own notes cite reviews of live performances that spoke of a vast, brooding stillness "rewarded by moments of great, piercing beauty."

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1656, first released in August 1999, in an outer card sleeve with a 44-page booklet.