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Alexander Knaifel

Chapter Eight

ECM
Release Date: March 21, 2025

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1 Stanza I-VII  
2 Stanza VIII-XXII  
3 Stanza XXIII-XXXII  
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Chapter Eight: Canticum Canticorum is among the most remarkable compositions of Alexander Knaifel. Written in 1992 and 1993 and based upon the eighth chapter of the Old Testament Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, it is conceived as a “community prayer”.  In his imagination, while writing it, Knaifel said he “heard it in the most reverberant church acoustics.” A slowly moving piece that acquires a cumulative power with enveloping and radiant atmosphere, it proposes what Knaifel referred to as a “non-concerto situation”. As the work progresses, the cellist is called upon to renounce the soloist’s role of leadership and to surrender to the total sound at the nexus of the choirs, arranged in cross formation inside the church.

Here the cellist is Patrick Demenga who, together with his brother Thomas, made the first of ECM’s recordings of Knaifel’s music in 1998 with Lux Aeterna. Many of Knaifel’s works implied a spiritual or contemplative dimension and in its obituary of the Russian composer,  who died last year, Gramophone wrote that “his style proved ideal for the ECM aesthetic, allowing the luminous, meditative qualities of the music to shine through”.   Those qualities are evident as Estonian conductor Andres Mustonen subtly directs three Latvian choirs:  the State Choir Latvija, the Youth Choir Kamer and the Riga Cathedral Boys Choir. “Andres Mustonen managed to make the choral voices float,” wrote Michael Dervan, a witness to the performance here,  in the Irish Times. “The sounds sometimes seemed to emerge as imperceptibly as a cloud slowly forming in a clear sky. In the welcoming rococo interior of Lucerne’s Jesuit Church, the effect was of prolonged, quiet ravishment.”

  • Chapter Eight: Canticum Canticorum is among the most remarkable compositions of Alexander Knaifel
    Posted At: February 28, 2025
    Alexander Knaifel was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1943, and grew up in St Petersburg.  Setting out, initially, to be a cellist, he studied with teachers including Mstislav Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatory in the early 1960s.  As a composer he was soon allied with an emerging Soviet avant-garde, a network of friends such as Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina and Valentin Sil...
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