FREE UK SHIPPING OVER £30!

Knaifel - Blazhenstva (The Beatitudes), Lamento

£12.69

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

Label: ECM New Series

Cat No: 4766767

Barcode: 0028947667674

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Release Date: 29th September 2008

Works

Knaifel, Alexander

Blazhenstva (The Beatitudes)
Lamento for cello solo

Artists

Ivan Monighetti (piano, violoncello)
Tatiana Melentieva (soprano)
Piotr Migunov (bass)
State Hermitage Orchestra
Lege Artis Choir

Conductor

Ivan Monighetti

Works

Knaifel, Alexander

Blazhenstva (The Beatitudes)
Lamento for cello solo

Artists

Ivan Monighetti (piano, violoncello)
Tatiana Melentieva (soprano)
Piotr Migunov (bass)
State Hermitage Orchestra
Lege Artis Choir

Conductor

Ivan Monighetti

About

Alexander Knaifel’s “exquisitely refined” and “beautiful” music is featured on a third ECM recording, again pairing world premieres. Two strikingly different compositions are inspirationally linked through the late Mstislav Rostropovich: Lamento is an expressive piece for solo cello while the radiant choral work Blazhenstva (The Beatitudes) was written as a birthday present for the cellist in 1996.

Knaifel’s background as a cellist is put to good service in the 18-minute Lamento for solo cello (written 1967, revised 1987). The scope of the instrument’s expressive potential is brought into play from the first furious sounds. Ivan Monighetti, who was Rostropovich’s last student at the Moscow Conservatory, rises to the work’s dynamic challenges.

In contrast, Blazhenstva is a radiant meditation on the Sermon on the Mount, for soloists, orchestra and choir, written as a 70th birthday present for Rostropovich in 1996. Monighetti here has a triple role - as pianist, cellist and conductor, and Knaifel’s wife, Tatiana Melentieva, possessor of a meltingly pure voice, is the soprano soloist as she was on ECM’s first release of premiere recordings of the composer’s music, 'Svete Tikhiy' (461 8142).

The St Petersburg-based Alexander Knaifel (born in Tashkent in 1943), whose music has been described by the Frankfurter Rundschau as "one of the most important revelations of recent years", belongs to that circle of near-contemporaries and associates from the former Soviet lands which includes Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov and Sofia Gubaidulina. He is well-known in Russia as both a serious composer and a composer of film music - he has scored more than 40 feature films.

The State Hermitage Orchestra, originally known as the St Petersburg Camerata, was founded in 1989 by Saulius Sondeckis, well-known to ECM listeners for his history-making performance as conductor of Pärt’s Tabula rasa.