Valentin Silvestrov, Alexei Lubimov, Radio Symphonieorchester Wien, Dennis Russell Davies

This album pairs two large works for piano and orchestra by Valentin Silvestrov: Postludium (1984), a symphonic poem, and Metamusik (1992), a single-movement symphony lasting close to fifty minutes. Both titles name ideas Silvestrov uses to describe his later style, a music that comes after music and sounds like the echo of something remembered. Here that intimate idea is projected onto an orchestral scale, and Metamusik appeared on CD for the first time.

Metamusik was written for Alexei Lubimov, one of the composer's closest champions, and Postludium for Virko Baley. Lubimov recorded both with the Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien under Dennis Russell Davies at the ORF Studio in Vienna in April 2001, in a co-production of ECM and the orchestra. Manfred Eicher produced and Anton Reininger engineered. The booklet carries texts by Lubimov, Tatjana Frumkis and Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, along with Rainer Maria Rilke's poem To Music. Silvestrov dedicated the recording to his wife, Larissa Bondarenko.

The piano rarely acts as a soloist in the traditional sense. As Ingo Harden noted in Fono Forum, Silvestrov almost entirely avoids chords in its writing, and its sound becomes the leading colour of the orchestral palette. Both pieces open with an orchestral fanfare that seems to draw back a curtain, then dissolve into shadows and echoes of scale fragments, triplet figures, arpeggios, tremolos and self-quotations. Metamusik passes through a menacing section of massive chords and episodes of soft, bell-like piano figuration before a long and ethereal coda. Postludium, the more compact of the two, is darker and more dramatic, and it dissolves into a tender, dreamlike close.

In Billboard, Bradley Bambarger wrote that the pieces "bend in and out of aural focus, as edgy, forward-minded ideas mix with nostalgic touches of great beauty". Robert Layton in International Record Review praised the "expert and authoritative playing" of the Vienna orchestra and the recorded sound. The album followed the chamber music collection leggiero, pesante in ECM's Silvestrov series and came out a year before the Requiem for Larissa.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1790, first released on 26 May 2003.