Alexander Knaifel, Oleg Malov, Tatiana Melentieva, Piotr Migunov, Lege Artis Choir

Lukomoriye is the fourth album that ECM New Series has devoted to the St Petersburg composer Alexander Knaifel, after Svete Tikhiy, Amicta Sole and Blazhenstva. Its eight pieces, written between 1994 and 2014, move from the sacred to the secular and back. There are two choral prayers, two songs and four works for piano in which a text is intoned by the performer but never heard. The music is slow and quiet, and often close to silence.

The performers have all recorded Knaifel's music before. Pianist Oleg Malov plays the four solo pieces and accompanies the two songs, sung by soprano Tatiana Melentieva and bass Piotr Migunov. The Lege Artis Choir under Boris Abalian sings the prayers. The recording was made in February 2012 in the Smolny Cathedral in St Petersburg, by the St Petersburg Recording Studio, and Knaifel supervised the sessions himself. ECM released it six years later, in April 2018.

The texts come from Pushkin, the Gospel of St Luke, St Ephrem the Syrian, Lewis Carroll and Orthodox hymns. Bliss, on a Pushkin poem, is close to a patter song, and Melentieva delivers the words at great speed. O Lord of all my life, a sixteen-minute "prayer and a poem" that joins Pushkin to St Ephrem, has Migunov singing in a hushed voice while the piano seems to recede. The closing Lukomoriye, after the prologue of Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila, is written "of a magic piano": whispered voices surround Malov's playing, and the instrument seems to multiply. The choral prayers O Comforter and O Heavenly King follow the style of Russian Orthodox liturgical singing.

Reviewers stressed both the strangeness and the calm of the music. Dominy Clements wrote in MusicWeb International in 2018 that "this is indeed a fascinating and at times unsettling recording", and noted the high bells that recur across the programme. In Opera News, Arlo McKinnon wrote that "Knaifel's music uniquely blends erudition and experimentation", and he singled out Melentieva's verbal agility in Bliss. Raymond Tuttle in Fanfare called the performances probably definitive, given the musicians' history with the composer.

This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM New Series 2436, first released in April 2018. The booklet prints the texts with English translations.