Following on from Victor Kissine’s luminous orchestration of Schubert’s String Quartet in G Major (4761939) and his own Zerkalo with Gidon Kremer and friends (4764171), here is the first ECM album devoted entirely to the compositions of the composer from St. Petersburg. The flavour of the sea pervades all three of these recent compositions, variously inspired by the poetry of Mandelstam and Brodsky: the concerto for piano and string orchestra Between Two Waves, the Duo (After Osip Mandelstam) for viola and violoncello, and Barcarola for violin, string orchestra and percussion.

All three pieces, each receiving its premier recording, are dedicated to the collaborating players - Gidon Kremer and the musicians of Kremerata Baltica. Of the ‘Barcarole’, Kissine has said that it reflects the experience with Kremer and company on the earlier Schubert orchestration. Subsequently Kissine “wanted to write a piece that was orchestral but intimate - a kind of ‘concerto in watercolour’. The explicitly chamber character of the ‘Barcarole’ guided me toward the form of a concerto in one movement, which also unfolds in waves.” The pieces are linked by references to Bach, explicit in the Duo and implied in “Between Two Waves” and “Barcarola”. The music’s signature, however is unmistakably Kissine’s. “Many experiences and emotions - friendship, admiration and affinity - lie beneath the surface of this reticent musical language,” Belgian critc Frans C. Lemaire has noted. “[It] prefers soft murmurings to loud pronouncements, and closely restricts the development of the melodic material. [Kissine’s] music does not celebrate vain and noisy human activity, but seeks to recapture a kind of lost harmony which - far removed from the world - is borne up by the mysterious voices of silence.”

The album, recorded at the 2011 Lockenhaus Festival, is issued to celebrate Kissine’s 60th birthday (on 15 March, 2013).