In his own booklet note for this valuable new recording, Valentin Silvestrov outlines how these pieces arose ‘unintentionally and spontaneously’. Between 2003 and 2017 he composed around 30 hours of short pieces for solo piano, grouped them into cycles of 2-10 pieces and then organised them into ‘super-cycles’ of Bagatelles designed to be played continuously, ‘forming a long chain of musical moments.’

The Polish pianist Tomasz Kamieniak presents one of those super-cycles on this album. ‘I strongly recommend that you listen to this disc without interruption,’ writes Silvestrov. ‘Then the metaphorical nature of this music will become more obvious this is not neo-romanticism, there is no stylisation, but, perhaps, something new, a hidden modernness.’

It was indeed this quality of hidden modernity, something recovered from the past and made new again, that gained Silvestrov a cult following once the Melodiya recording of his Fifth Symphony reached Europe in the 1980s. Since then his output has embraced instrumental music of almost every genre as well as a painfully beautiful Requiem written to honour the memory of his late wife Larissa Bondarenko. Silvestrov’s aim in nearly all his music is to offer peace and consolation.

In a second note for the album, Tomasz Kamieniak explains how this music is trickier to perform than it may sound. On a single page, sometimes within a single line, the scores are meticulously inflected by a wide range of dynamic and phrasing marks, nearly all within a soft spectrum and encouraging the performer to play lightly, sweetly, as if from far away, evoking a mood of remembrance and gentle elegy.