Tigran Mansurian, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Anja Lechner, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Candida Thompson

Quasi parlando gathers four works for soloists and string orchestra by the Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian, issued in the wake of his 75th birthday. Three of them are first recordings, and two are played by the musicians they were written for: the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the cellist Anja Lechner. Spanning more than thirty years of writing, the programme shows how consistent his voice has remained.

The album was recorded in October 2012 at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam, with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under its artistic leader Candida Thompson. Manfred Eicher produced, with Peter Laenger and Stephan Schellmann as engineers. Just before the sessions Mansurian gave a talk at the hall. There he said: "What is important is what the music needs, not what I need." The liner notes are by Wolfgang Sandner.

The Double Concerto for violin, cello and strings (1978), dedicated to Natalia Gutman and Oleg Kagan, opens the disc with two long, concentrated slow movements, calm passages giving way to violent outbursts. The Romance (2011) begins with the four-bar phrases of a plain, folk-like song before the strings draw the violin into dialogue. Quasi parlando (2012), for cello and strings, gives Lechner a broken, speech-like line, and Sandner hears in it Mansurian's aesthetics of reduction: "Every note is exactly where it belongs." The Concerto No. 2, Four Serious Songs (2006), closes the album, with a short violin cadenza in its second movement. Kopatchinskaja has called its solo part "pure spirit and magic".

Writing in BBC Music Magazine, Calum MacDonald praised Kopatchinskaja's "pure, rich tone and unforced eloquence", which in his view does much to create the sound-world of the programme. Dominy Clements of MusicWeb International (2014) linked the Romance to the archaic Armenian folk song in Mansurian's background and called the disc "another feather in ECM's already verdant cap". In The Strad (2014), David Kettle heard an intense, almost raw Kopatchinskaja and a restless Lechner telling a story in the recitative-like title piece.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2323, first released on 21 March 2014, with a booklet essay by Wolfgang Sandner in German and English.