Lost Prayers is the first ECM New Series album devoted entirely to the chamber music of the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür, born in 1959 and known above all for his orchestral works. Four pieces written between 2002 and 2017 show that his "vectorial" method, which grows whole structures from small melodic and rhythmic seeds, loses no force with three or four players. "One can build up a really rich and wide palette of sounds with only three or four instruments," Tüür has said. His long association with the label began in 1996 with Crystallisatio, the first of several New Series albums devoted to his music.
Two groups share the disc. The Estonian trio of Harry Traksmann (violin), Leho Karin (cello) and Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann (piano) plays the two piano trios. All three have long performed Tüür's music and appeared on his earlier ECM albums, among them Oxymoron. The German Signum Quartett plays the Second String Quartet, and its violinist Florian Donderer joins the cellist Tanja Tetzlaff for the duo Synergie. The album was recorded in April 2019 at the Sendesaal in Bremen, with Christoph Franke as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer.
Fata Morgana (2002) for violin, cello and piano opens with heavy piano chords and spread arpeggios, between which the strings build long, almost trance-like lines. Synergie (2010), written for Renaud and Gautier Capuçon, starts from gossamer textures and grows into an ever more intense dialogue between violin and cello. The String Quartet No. 2 Lost Prayers (2012) sets grinding chords against quiet, suspended passages. The trio Lichttürme (Towers of Light, 2017) follows Tüür's characteristic rising lines, with colours and rhythms that The Strad compared to Messiaen, towards a calmer coda.
In The Strad Andrew Mellor called it "a delicious piece of programming" and found the mirror-playing of Donderer and Tetzlaff in Synergie "astonishing". BBC Music Magazine gave the album five stars, and its reviewer Steph Power praised the coherence of works spanning fifteen years. James Manheim at AllMusic singled out the engineering from the Sendesaal Bremen as exceptional even by ECM standards.
CD edition, ECM New Series 2666, first released in November 2020, with liner notes by Wolfgang Sandner.
