Silvestrov reviews
The Messenger (Hélène Grimaud)
Hélène Grimaud (piano); Camerata Salzburg (DG)
Lechner and Vesterman perform Silvestrov
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Elisaveta Blumina performs piano works by Kancheli, Silvestrov and Ustvolskaya
Elisaveta Blumina’s selection of works for piano and orchestra by the Russian Galina Ustvolskaya, the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov and the Georgian Giya Kancheli offers the maximum contrast in expression and emotion. By far the earliest work is Ustvolskaya’s 1946 Concerto for piano, strings and timpani.
Simon Smith Performs Piano Sonatas by Valentin Silvestrov
Piano Sonatas Nos 1-3; Classical Sonata; Children’s Music 1; Nostalghia
Concertos for Orchestra 1-3: Karabits • Silvestrov
Valentin Silvestrov: Sacred Works
Silvestrov’s development parallels a number of other composers of his generation and background. He first challenged Soviet orthodoxy by embracing Western Modernism, then found a form of cultural rebellion with deeper roots in ancient melodies and Christian Orthodoxy – most evident in the Liturgical Chants, a work which initiated a new phase in Silvestrov’s development.
Silvestrov - Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5
Silvestrov’s music has evolved into a kind of endless keening nostalgia for the confidence, the melodic and harmonic riches, of the 19th-century symphonic tradition up to Mahler. Over the past decade or so this has come to seem a stance with limited returns. But not in the Fifth Symphony (1980-82), admired as one of his most significant works.
Silvestrov: Bagatelles; Stille Musik; Farewell Serenade; The Messenger; Two Dialogues with an Afterthought; Elegy
Released as a 70th birthday tribute to the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, this collection of evocative miniatures inhabits a similarly nostalgic sound world to that of his larger-scale works such as the celebrated Fifth Symphony. In the
13 Bagatelles for solo piano, performed in a characteristically intimate manner by the composer himself, the prevailing moods are gentle and calm, the contrasts achieved more through textural and melodic inflection than by a drastic variety in tempo.
Silvestrov: Nostalghia; Sonata No. 1; Two Dialogues with an Epilogue; Three Postludes; Three Waltzes etc
Valentin Silvestrov’s music can beguile, or exasperate. Alongside works of passionate lament like his Requiem for Larissa there are others where the habitual stance of weary, alienated regret, often sustained to near-interminable length, raises existential nostalgia to hitherto unimaginable levels of tedium. At least the works for piano (with its built-in decay) that Jenny Lin performs here are all quite short, mostly in fact from the present decade, which Silvestrov calls his ‘Bagatelle period’.
Silvestrov, PŠrt, Ustvolskaya
Commissioned for the bicentenary
of Mozart’s death, Silvestrov’s
1991 Post-Scriptum is the ghost of
a Classical violin sonata, familiar
melodic gestures dissolving into
uneasily rocking ostinatos, cadences
interrupted and frozen in palsied
stasis, signifiers of nostalgia and
regret. It makes a fitting start to this
well-filled CD.
By contrast, Silvestrov’s recent
Misterioso, written for the clarinettist
and pianist Evgeny Orkin, performed
here by Kirill Rybakov, has a bracing
solidity, bold in its dissonance
and expressionistic gestures – an
Bryas; Maskats; Silvestrov
The English composer Gavin Bryars has a taste for anything off the beaten track, so listening to his CDs as they appear on his own GB label is always an education. Thanks to this one, I’ve now encountered Thomas de Quincey’s touching literary memorial to Immanuel Kant, the marvellous 13th-century Italian poet Cecco Angiolieri, and a poem in praise of photography by Pope Leo XIII. We hear them all in settings by Bryars, sung by the Latvian Radio Choir, also new to me.
Silvestrov: Requiem for Larissa
The Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov has established himself over the past three decades as a ‘composer of farewells’, of long slow elegies to Romanticism, to melody, to tonality gradually and ineluctably effaced by time. Sometimes eloquently compelling, sometimes (in my experience) tedious beyond belief, this aesthetic stance finds its perfect and tragic justification in the Requiem he composed in 1997-9 following the death of his wife, Larissa.
Silvestrov: Metamusik; Postludium
Is it missing the point to remark that much of Valentin Silvestrov’s music takes an unconscionable time a-dying? Yes, I see it’s all meant to be farewells and echoes, unassuageable regret for a lost and now deracinated Romantic tonality. A big bang, then an eternity – well, 47 minutes, in Metamusik – of tinklings and tinkerings with the fading resonance. He’s gifted, no question, and a wan beauty and poignancy abound. But isn’t there something fatally self-indulgent about this endless Abschied, with its cod-tonal quasi-pastiches?
Silvestrov: Symphony No. 5; Postludium
The Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov was born in 1937 and came late to music. His Fifth Symphony (1980-82) has a nine-part arch-structure, underlining his belief that ‘form continues to resonate in invisible, inaudible space, in spite of a unity that exists on every level’. In Postludium, for piano and orchestra (1984) ‘neither composer nor musicians are overshadowed by the great composers of the [Romantic] past: they go on singing a beautiful, old and endless song, albeit with a catch in their breath’ (Tatiana Frumkis).
Silvestrov: Dedication; Post scriptum
Over the last 15 years or so, the generation of Russian composers born in the Thirties, such as Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina, have become cult figures in the West. But even amongst that group of visionaries, Silvestrov cuts an extraordinary and eccentric figure. Since the Seventies, he’s made, in Gidon Kremer’s words, ‘a nostalgic attempt to awaken Romanticism to a new life’. But in fact the impression you get from these strange pieces is that Silvestrov invokes phrases from Romantic music in order to put them to sleep.
CPE Bach, Cage, Mansurian, Liszt, Glinka, Chopin, Silvestrov, Debussy, Bart—k
The pieces on this CD range from CPE Bach (a madly adventurous not to say incoherent fantasy) to Valentin Silvestrov’s Der Bote (The Messenger). The theme is ‘Elegies for piano’, and the reverberant, distant recording gives Lubimov’s bell-like touch an intangible quality – ideal, I suppose, for Cage’s euphonious orientalism in In a Landscape which is all about resonance. The best-known item is Chopin’s C sharp minor Prelude, Op. 45 – very dreamily played – but the short pieces by Liszt, Glinka, Debussy and Bartók are real rarities.
Silvestrov: Leggiero, pesante: Cello Sonata; String Quartet No. 1; Three Postludia; Hymn 2001
Gentle, nostalgic, deeply disturbed, most of Valentin Silvestrov’s music is imbued with the spirit of postlude, of aftermaths and farewells. Renouncing Western ideals of goal-directed development, he has increasingly cultivated a language of profound melancholic lyricism and incantatory stasis, a sense of the magical and of an irrecoverable past. These works enact a kind of circular journey through an aural landscape, littered with fragments of tradition, shards of song.