In May 1984, one of Kancheli's best friends, the Georgian music critic Givi Ordzhonikidze, died. Four months later, Dr. Ulrich Eckhardt, the director of the West Berlin Festival, commissioned for performance at the festival a work from Kancheli to be dedicated to Ordzhonikidze's memory. The result, the four-movement liturgy Mourned by the Wind, was not completed until the autumn of 1988; its first performance had to wait yet another two years, until September 9, 1990, when violist Yuri Bashmet and the Orchestra of the Leningrad Kirov Theatre under Valery Gergiev played the work in West Berlin.

Kancheli wrote of Mourned by the Wind: "Probably a page, a blank page containing a faint trace of dried tears could tell us everything or almost everything about the contents of the Liturgy..." The work was one of Kancheli's quietest, most melancholic and static compositions to date. It begins with a loud dissonant chord in the piano, which opens the Molto largo first movement. The viola enters, rocking sadly between two notes, accompanied by spacious chords from the orchestra. The tone is overall one of resignation, with an occasional more intense outburst. Martial sounds from the brass and percussion, long tones from the viola, and a big Shostakovich-like climax mark the second movement, Allegro moderato. The third movement, Larghetto, returns to a mournful tone, with delicate harpsichord and tuned percussion decorating long, sustained tones from the soloist and orchestra. In the final movement, Andante maestoso, the dark voice of the viola contrasts with a forceful idea in the orchestra that recurs several times. More diatonic material seems to offer some solace, but the pervading gloom remains, only somewhat dispelled by a peaceful coda.

On completing the composition, Kancheli wrote a letter to his friend Ordzhonikidze, now dead for four years: "It is unbearably difficult without you...Many still have to realize that by defending us, you were asserting your faith, your truth, your music...We need you now, when there is a demand for thinkers, preachers, fighters. A demand for genuine leaders...So much that is unexpected, new, exciting is happening before our eyes...To the limit of my capabilities I have attempted to express in the Liturgy my personal attitude to such a personality. To the ideal that was, for me, embodied in this person."

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