Much of Silvestrov’s music since the mid-1970s has been a requiem in all but name – a rite of regret and consolation for music and for the hopes and dreams of modern consciousness. So it is no surprise that he should join Schnittke, Denisov, Tishchenko and others of the post-Shostakovich generation in composing a work of that name.

The external stimulus was the sudden death in 1996 of his musicologist wife Larissa Bondarenko, his staunch supporter through trials of the kind virtually all modernist composers in the former USSR had to face. He completed the work three years later, having built into the ‘Tuba Mirum’ section the fractured but passionate textures of his (unrecorded) First Symphony of 1963, and having arranged the second Agnus Dei around his Mozartian piano piece, The Messenger, which his wife had not lived to hear.

At the heart of the Requiem is his Taras Shevchenko setting, ‘The Dream’, as breathtakingly moving here as in its original place in the cycle Silent Songs (on Megadisc). Otherwise he fragments the Requiem text and disposes its incomplete phrases across seven mostly slow movements; only the ‘Lacrimosa’ survives intact. The choir features a basso profundo section and three soloists who gently ease in and out of the texture. The classical-size orchestra is augmented by synthesizer, first heard in the celestial harmonies succeeding the first Agnus Dei.

Initially I wondered if the music might not have benefited from an acoustic with rather more bloom on it. But Silvestrov’s scoring has its own built-in echo chambers, which are extraordinarily telling when he brings them into play, and the central movements are effectively distanced. Nor is there any doubting the devotion of the performance – the composer’s compatriots do him proud. Paul Griffiths’ booklet-note shows how the poetic aspirations of ECM’s documentation can be taken on board without pretentiousness or wishful thinking. A pity only that the Shevchenko text is not translated.

Whether or not you know the fragile, haunting sound world of Ukraine’s senior composer, this is a disc I urge you to try.