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 is César Franck’s massive Piano Quintet, flanked by works of a ‘spiritual’ cast by Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer and Giya Kancheli.

Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor is the work in which the Belgian-French composer is perhaps at his most impassioned and melodically inventive. BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili (b 1987), in her ECM debut, gives a bold and compelling performance.

Gidon Kremer and Giya Kancheli have a long association that has resulted in several ECM recordings, including the superb ‘Lament’, and ‘Time...and Again’ and ‘V & V’ 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’.

Long a champion of original compositional voices, Kremer presents also music by Stevan Tickmayer, born in the former Yugoslavia in 1963, and currently resident in France. A musician of diverse background, Tickmayer has been studying with Kurtág since the mid-90s. He began his Eight Hymns in December 1986, on learning of the death of his favourite film maker, Andrei Tarkovsky, and played the (unfinished) work in his solo concerts for several years. He revised it in 2003 after working with Kremerata, “the ideal messengers” for this musical mourning.