Giya Kancheli, Nederlands Kamerkoor, Raschèr Saxophone Quartet, Mamuka Gaganidze, Zaza Miminoshvili, Rustavi Choir, Children's Choir, Nika Memanishvili

This ECM New Series album pairs two vocal works by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, both written in the 2000s and both concerned with war and loss. Little Imber is a site-specific piece, inspired by the English village of the same name on Salisbury Plain, a ghost town since it was evacuated in 1943 and given over to military training. Amao Omi, whose title translates as "senseless war", sets a phonetic text for mixed choir and saxophone quartet. Together they show Kancheli's slow, fragile writing at its most direct.

Little Imber (2003) was commissioned and produced by Artangel and recorded in August 2003 in Imber itself, at the village church of St Giles. It brings together English and Georgian performers: the Matrix Ensemble, the men of the Rustavi Choir, singer Mamuka Gaganidze, guitarist Zaza Miminoshvili and conductor and keyboardist Nika Memanishvili. A children's choir was added in October 2003 in Tbilisi. Amao Omi (2005) was written for the Nederlands Kamerkoor, which recorded it under Klaas Stok with the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet at the Waalse Kerk in Amsterdam in May 2006. Manfred Eicher produced the album, with Kancheli supervising the recordings.

Amao Omi lasts 26 minutes. Choir and saxophones keep exchanging roles, the reeds sometimes sustaining the voices and sometimes carrying the line over choral chords. Long stretches close to silence are broken by sudden crescendos. Little Imber runs to almost 36 minutes and is built around an anonymous poem about the village. Gaganidze's Georgian solo laments, the bright children's voices and the darker men's choir come and go over a spare ensemble texture. The verse returns at the end in both children's and adult voices.

In International Record Review, Ivan Moody wrote that Kancheli, "in music as delicately balanced as this, is treading an aesthetic tightrope." Barry Witherden, in BBC Music Magazine, heard in Little Imber "poignant echoes of village life and its fragility in the face of powerful interests", and called Amao Omi "a cool yet compassionate piece." Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews singled out Gaganidze's solos as the high point of the title work.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1812, first released in 2008.