Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica. Hymns and Prayers (CD)

This is a beautifully-recorded album from master violinist Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata, Baltica, spanning a wide range of music, from the spirited to the spiritual, all of it broached with conviction. Intensity and concentration, differently calibrated, are the watchwords here. At the centre of the disc is César Franck's massive piano quintet, the work in which the Belgian-French composer is perhaps at his most impassioned and melodically inventive. Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili (b 1987), in her ECM debut, gives a bold and compelling performance. The spirited Franck composition is flanked on this disc by works of a `spiritual' cast, pieces by Tickmayer and Kancheli. Gidon Kremer and Giya Kancheli have a long association that has already resulted in several recordings on ECM, including the superb Lament: Music of Mourning in Memory of Luigi Nono (recorded 1998) and Time...and Again (1999) and "V & V" (2000) on the album In l'istesso tempo. "Silent Prayer" was composed on the occasion of the 80th birthday of Mstislav Rostropovich and the 60th birthday of Gidon Kremer in 2007 and is dedicated to these two great musicians, both among Kancheli's closest friends. After Rostropovich died shortly after his birthday, the composer entitled the just-finished work "Silent Prayer." The world premiere took place on 7 October 2007 at the Kronberg Cello Festival which was dedicated to the memory of the late virtuoso, with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica. Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica will be performing Kancheli's "Silent Prayer" on their North America tour this autumn. Early performances have been much praised by critics. " The spare and ruminative music seems to drift off the stage with infinite slowness, like a mist. Kremer and his colleague, floating wispy lines from the highest reaches of their instruments, were compelling guides to this ethereal landscape", wrote Jeremy Eichler in the Boston Globe. Long a champion of original compositional voices, Kremer here presents also music of Stevan Tickmayer, born in the former Yugoslavia in 1963, and currently a resident of France. A musician of diverse background, Tickmayer has been studying with Kurtág since the mid-90s, and has had his own work played by ensembles from the Netherlands Wind Ensemble to the Moscow Soloists - but he has also collaborated with improvisers and avant-rock players including Chris Cutler, Fred Frith and Peter Kowald. On Kremer's invitation he was composer in residence at Lockenhaus in 2003 and 2009.

Tickmayer began his "Eight Hymns" in December 1986, on learning of the death of his favourite filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, and played the (unfinished) work in his solo concerts for several years. He revised it in 2003 after working with the musicians of the Kremerata, "the ideal messengers" - given their Eastern European backgrounds - for this musical mourning. The "Eight Hymns" is the first recording of Tickmayer's music on ECM.