Many of Valentin Silvestrov’s smaller form works for piano are addressed to fellow composers both past and present, including Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Purcell, Glinka, and Silvestrov’s contemporaries Leonid Hrabovsky, Alexander Knaifel, Arvo Pärt, and Andre Volkonsky. Pianist Alexei Lubimov, who has been performing Silvestrov’s works for more than half a century, curated this program as a musical dialogue with those composers—friends and fellow spirits united by admiration and shared feelings. As Lubimov says in the liner notes for the album: “These pieces are not imitations but meditations on his favorite music, they are his responses to its musical essence. In almost every piece one can hear the stylistic features of the addressee, but all of them contain Silvestrov’s recognizable volatility.”