Messe Noire is a solo recital by the Moscow pianist Alexei Lubimov built from four Russian works written between 1913 and 1943. They are Igor Stravinsky's Serenade in A, Dmitri Shostakovich's Second Sonata, Sergei Prokofiev's Seventh and Alexander Scriabin's Ninth, whose nickname gives the album its title. Lubimov calls the selection "a panorama of different styles". It was his first solo programme for ECM after Der Bote, and it concentrates on a span of only thirty years.

The recordings were made at Radio Studio DRS in Zürich in May 1998 and, for the Prokofiev, in December 2000, and the disc was released in June 2005. Manfred Eicher produced it, with Peter Laenger as engineer, and the booklet essay is by Reinhard Schulz. Lubimov dedicated the album to his teachers and mentors Anna Artobolevskaja, Heinrich Neuhaus, Lev Naumov and Maria Yudina. These were pieces he had played since his student years at the Moscow Conservatory, when his attention was mostly on the western avant-garde.

The Stravinsky dates from 1925, written between the Piano Sonata and Oedipus Rex, and its four short movements open the disc with a neoclassical, slightly deceptive cheerfulness. At the centre stand two sonatas composed in wartime, in 1942 and 1943. Prokofiev's Seventh, first played by Sviatoslav Richter, keeps a strained optimism through its toccata finale. Shostakovich's Second, written between his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, is bare and thin for long stretches and leans on Baroque models. Scriabin's one-movement Ninth Sonata of 1913 closes the programme in under nine minutes of dark, mystical music.

The British press was warm. In The Guardian, Andrew Clements found the Shostakovich relaxed and transparent, the Prokofiev tightly coiled, and singled out a "surprisingly emollient account of Scriabin's 'Black Mass' sonata." Shirley Ratcliffe in International Piano heard "an inspired symmetry to this programming" and wrote that Lubimov "is superb throughout." Calum MacDonald in BBC Music Magazine called the Scriabin "mesmerisingly done", though he found the Stravinsky too heavy in places. Colin Clarke, for MusicWeb International in 2005, named it "an absolutely tremendous disc."

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1679, first released in 2005.