Georgian composer Giya Kancheli's music ranges from brash to deeply personal. His scores explore dynamic and rhythmic extremes, and almost seem to be a soundtrack for angular, rhapsodic dreams. At times the orchestra swells to a heavy Russian march complete with bells and drums, and at other times there is near silence. The two works presented on this CD are enigmatic, yet one can sense that the materials are steeped in history, memory and drama.

Eagerly anticipated album by Georgia’s Giya Kancheli (“the most important composer to have emerged from the former Soviet Union since the death of Shostakovich.” – Time Magazine), released in the year of his 70th birthday. This disc features one of Kancheli’s most ardent champions, the great violinist Gidon Kremer., who plays in duo with his old comrade, Russian pianist Oleg Maisenberg on the 26 minute 'Time… and again”, and leads the Kremerata Baltica on “V & V” for violin, taped voice, and string orchestra.

The First Symphony is by way of a late graduation piece—Kancheli was 33 when he completed it in 1967. The style is much indebted to Shostakovich, in particular recalling the latter's Fourth Symphony, then only recently rehabilitated, but there is also a foretaste in the second movement of the mystical-apocalyptic tone which was soon to become Kancheli's hallmark. More striking than either symphony though is Mourned by the Wind, one of the very few pieces of music composed in memory of a musicologist—Kancheli's fellow-Georgian and a figure well known to Shostakovich scholars, Givi Ordzhonikidze. Here is another example of Kancheli's special gift for finding pathos in the simplest of musical materials, with the solo viola's unearthly keening set against waterfalls of passionate declamation for the full orchestra. In its starkness and haunting spirituality this should appeal to those who respond to Part, Gorecki or Tavener—and perhaps even more so to listeners who find those composers a little too glamorous in their asceticism, so to speak, and who prefer to meet the music half way, rather than merely submitting to its spell.

This pair of single-movement viola concertos written for Yuri Bashmet justify his renown. In both, he is able to draw an impressive variety of expressions from his instrument with seeming ease. On the other hand, it's obvious there was a lot of thought and care put into his interpretations. The concertos need thoughtful interpretations by the soloist and the conductor, not because the pieces are necessarily complex in rhythm or harmony, but they are complex in tone and color.