Alfred Schnittke's Ninth Symphony is the last music he wrote, put on paper with his left hand after a series of strokes had left him partly paralysed. The manuscript was close to illegible. This ECM disc gives the world premiere recording of the score as deciphered by the Moscow-born composer Alexander Raskatov, coupled with Raskatov's own Nunc dimittis, an epilogue written in Schnittke's memory.

The composer's widow, Irina Schnittke, hesitated for years over whom to trust with the reconstruction before choosing Raskatov. Both works were first performed in summer 2007 at the Dresden Frauenkirche by the same forces heard here. The recording was made in January 2008 at the Lukaskirche in Dresden with the Dresdner Philharmonie under Dennis Russell Davies. In the Nunc dimittis the orchestra is joined by mezzo-soprano Elena Vassilieva and the four singers of The Hilliard Ensemble. Peter Laenger and Markus Heiland engineered, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer.

The symphony runs to three movements and about 37 minutes. The long opening Andante moves between consonance and dissonance in slow blocks of string sound, the timpani entering late like a tired pulse. In the Moderato a harpsichord appears, a familiar Schnittke colour, placed against subdued winds and a chromatic line in the trumpet. Raskatov believed Schnittke had meant to write a fourth movement, and his Nunc dimittis answers that idea as a separate piece for mezzo-soprano, men's voices and orchestra. It sets lines by Joseph Brodsky, Schnittke's favourite poet, and a text by the Orthodox monk Starets Siluan, closing on gong and electric guitar.

Critics heard the Ninth as a departure from the thinning-out of Schnittke's previous symphonies. Richard Whitehouse wrote in International Record Review that it opts for "relatively full textures that, while not actively contrapuntal, are intensely polyphonic", and praised "the precision that Dennis Russell Davies brings to his reading". Audio named it its classical CD of the month and Scherzo rated it exceptional. In BBC Music Magazine Erik Levi gave four stars, finding the symphony hard to grasp but the performance persuasive. Writing for Die Zeit, Volker Hagedorn heard music that moves in deep shadow, without consolation but with enormous breadth.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2025, first released in February 2009, with a booklet containing a conversation between Raskatov and Helmut Peters and the sung texts in translation.