leggiero, pesante opened ECM's series of recordings of Valentin Silvestrov, and was the label's first full programme of the Ukrainian composer's music. It gathers chamber works written between 1974 and 1983, plus a short piano piece from 2001. The recording was made with the composer taking part, and he plays the final piece himself. It was nominated for Best Chamber Music Performance at the 45th Grammy Awards.

The sessions took place in January 2001 at the Festeburgkirche in Frankfurt am Main, produced by Manfred Eicher with Markus Heiland as engineer, and Tatjana Frumkis wrote the booklet notes. Cellist Anja Lechner and pianist Silke Avenhaus play the Sonata for cello and piano (1983). The Rosamunde Quartett, in which Lechner is the cellist, plays the String Quartet No. 1 (1974). In the Three Postludes (1981/82), soprano Maacha Deubner sings in the first, violinist Simon Fordham plays the second alone, and Lechner and Avenhaus return for the third.

The quartet starts from falling phrases and gentle cadences in a harmony as plain as a folk song. Then the picture clouds, dissonances creep in, and the piece stops on a soft sustained discord that fades into toneless whispers. The first Postlude, subtitled DSCH, decodes Shostakovich's musical monogram and stands as a requiem for him. The third seems to take up the melody of the Cello Sonata. Silvestrov's Hymne 2001, dedicated to the poet Osip Mandelstam, is played in a shadowy, heavily pedalled undertone.

Writing in The New York Times, Paul Griffiths heard "a particularly powerful, rich and vital response" from Lechner and Avenhaus in the two works they share. David Fanning in International Record Review called the composer's own Hymne 2001 "a fascinating glimpse into the performing style he has in mind". Griffiths heard in Silvestrov an art of farewell, where the past sounds through the gaps in modernism. In Fono Forum, Tilman Urbach singled out the colours the Rosamunde Quartett draws from the First Quartet. Writing in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Alfred Zimmerlin felt that this performance seemed made for the compact disc itself, its sound, space and dynamics.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1776, first released in February 2002.