Victor Kissine, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Gidon Kremer, Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė, Khatia Buniatishvili

This album sets Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A minor op. 50 beside a new trio written for the players who perform it. Gidon Kremer, the Lithuanian cellist Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė and the Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili pair the great Russian elegy of 1882 with Zerkalo (The Mirror), composed for them in 2009 by Victor Kissine. The two works stand at either end of the history of Russian chamber music, and here each throws light on the other.

Kremer formed the trio with his two younger partners in 2009, the same year Kissine wrote Zerkalo and dedicated it to them. At the time ECM presented Buniatishvili and Dirvanauskaitė as two of the most gifted players of their generation, and the album appeared on the eve of a tour of Europe and Japan. The album was recorded in August 2010 at the Himmelfahrtskirche in Munich-Sendling, with Peter Laenger as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. The booklet includes notes by Kissine and by Jürg Stenzl.

Zerkalo takes its title and mood from two lines of Anna Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero: "The mirror dreams only of the mirror / Silence watches over silence." It lasts about twenty minutes and is mostly quiet, with fragmentary melodic cells that gather force and then dissolve into a bleak coda, and a piano often used percussively. Tchaikovsky wrote his trio in Rome in the winter of 1881 and 1882, "to the memory of a great artist", his friend Nikolai Rubinstein. After the long Pezzo elegiaco comes a theme with eleven variations, from a waltz and a fugue to a mazurka, and a finale that sinks into a funeral march.

Critics treated the disc as a reference recording. Erik Levi in BBC Music Magazine (2012) praised "a powerfully projected performance" in which the players "steadfastly avoid emotional hyperbole", and found Zerkalo an intriguing companion piece. Friedemann Leipold of BR Klassik called it a new reference recording of the Tchaikovsky, played with freedom and intimacy and without the slightest trace of sentimentality. C. Michael Bailey at All About Jazz singled out the seamless interplay in the opening Pezzo elegiaco.

CD, ECM New Series 2202, first released in April 2011.