21st-century piano music by the most distinguished Ukrainian composer of our time, recorded by a Polish pianist who has already won acclaim for his interpretations of Silvestrov’s music.

With the album ‘Melodies of Silence’, Tomasz Kamieniak demonstrated his affinity with the music of Valentin Silvestrov, as international critics have recognised. ‘The spectrum of piano literature is referenced,’ according to Gramophone, ‘thus making Silvestrov’s endeavour as inclusive as it is extensive. Kamieniak is an enlightening guide, and one looks forward to future instalments in a project like no other.’

This second instalment continues to document the fertile creativity which Silvestrov has found in the last quarter-century, especially in the field of music for the piano and for choirs. Begun seemingly as a distraction from large-scale works, this concentration on the piano has resulted in some 30 hours of music, organised into several dozen cycles of short pieces, most of them hardly more than a couple of minutes in length.

Silvestrov then organised these into ‘meta-cycles’, each of them lasting in excess of an hour, intended to be performed as an unbroken continuity.

‘Echoes of Harmony’ can thus be viewed as a natural extension of ‘Melodies of Silence’. The movements pay tribute to established genres: serenades, pastorals, waltzes and bagatelles. Characteristically for Silvestrov, the music continually seems to evoke a lost, Schubertian past, while also reflecting on the impossibility of recovering it. This approach creates a sense of fleeting time, where the music seems to stretch infinitely, suspended in space.

There’s no clear endpoint in these miniatures, allowing the music to linger, dissolve, and pause. Silvestrov is himself an accomplished pianist, who draws a deep range of sonority from the piano, and his pieces encourage interpreters to find a centre of stillness both in the music and in themselves, without recourse to the kind of chill-out aesthetic of many contemporary piano composers.

Kamieniak enjoys a personal friendship with the composer, and his booklet introduction reflects both on the nature of these pieces and on their shared history.

‘Does the composer leave room for interpretational latitude?’ he asks ‘Will micro-rubatos, micro-accelerations, micro-dynamics resonate with every listener?

‘Questions abound, and among the more pertinent ones is whether a composer as rigorously attuned to his vision as Silvestrov will ever find satisfaction in interpretations by artists other than himself.’ At any rate, Kameniak has become one of the composer’s most insightful interpreters.