Hieroglyphen der Nacht gathers Valentin Silvestrov's music for solo cello and for two cellos, played by Anja Lechner and Agnès Vesterman. ECM released it in September 2017, in time for the Ukrainian composer's 80th birthday on 30 September. Silvestrov sees his work as a series of "codas" to music history, and many of these short pieces are conversations with composers of the past. Schumann and Tchaikovsky are named in the titles, and the writing leaves wide room for silence.
Lechner's association with Silvestrov goes back a long way, and was first documented on the Grammy-nominated leggiero, pesante in 2001. She and the French cellist Vesterman formed their duo in 2009, when Lechner was invited to play Silvestrov's solo and duo works at the Nostalghia Festival in Poznań. The album was recorded in December 2013 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano. Peter Laenger was the engineer and Manfred Eicher the producer, and the booklet carries texts by Lechner and Tatjana Frumkis.
Alone, Lechner plays Augenblicke der Stille und Traurigkeit, written for her in 2003, and Lacrimosa, a reaction to the music of Silvestrov's friend Tigran Mansurian. She also plays Walzer der Alpenglöckchen and Elegie, where soft strokes on two tam-tams sound behind a sparse cello line. With Vesterman she plays the Drei Stücke, dedicated to both musicians, the Zwei Serenaden, 8.VI.1810...zum Geburtstag R.A. Schumann and 25.X.1893...zum Andenken an P.I. Tschaikowskij. In the duos the two instruments are meant to sound as one, a kind of cello four-hands. In Nachhall eines Walzers, from the Drei Stücke, a hesitant pizzicato gives the waltz only as an echo.
Andy Gill, in The Independent, placed Silvestrov beside Cage and Feldman as a composer who finds a large world in small, circumscribed sounds. He called the album "an inventive journey through a single instrument's melancholy sound-world". Tyran Grillo, writing on ECM Reviews in 2019, heard the programme as a sequence of pieces circling an unspoken centre, with the two cellos merging into a single voice. Egon F. Bezold, in Der Opernfreund, praised the devotion of both cellists, in solo and in duo.
CD edition of ECM New Series 2389, first released on 22 September 2017.
