Silvestrov Rudin

The Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning was the Word and that the Word was sound. But what if it was music? What if God, in contemplating the creation of Creation, sang being into being? If so, it might have sounded something like the Sacred Songs of Valentin Silvestrov. In this seventh ECM album devoted to the Ukrainian composer’s music, we thusly encounter a sense of space unique to the Russian liturgy: the more the voices unify in movement, the more they lift from one another like temporary tattoos, leaving behind mirror images that wash away with baptism into infinite oneness with the Holy Spirit. Sin as sun. Firmament as fundament.

The pianist Alexei Lubimov has championed the music of those Soviet composers who explored an avant-garde style in the 1960s under the influence of the West, but then retreated from high modernism and sought a new style that could both offer a way forward and still allude to the sentimentality of the Classical and Romantic eras. The Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov is a famous example of such a career arc, and here Lubimov performs his first three sonatas for solo piano, followed by a sonata for cello and piano where Ivan Monighetti appears.

A nod toward historical authenticity is de rigueur in many kinds of performances, but performances of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, D. 821, on the instrument for which it was written are rare indeed. The performer who wants to undertake one faces several obstacles. Few examples of the arpeggione exist; the instrument was invented in Vienna in 1823 but quickly fell out of fashion. That might have been because, with six strings (it is something like a bowed guitar), it is quite difficult to play, and Schubert's sonata is the only major work written for it. Yet the instrument has a truly lovely voice, gentle and songful in its upper register where a cellist really has to bear down. Cellist Alexander Rudin has mastered its intricacies here, and the work emerges as quite idiomatically written for its instrument, not at all as a novelty.

Valentin Silvestrov composed Requiem for Larissa between 1997 and 1999 as a memorial to his wife, musicologist Larissa Bondarenko, who died in 1996. It is a big and unceasingly somber work, scored for chorus and orchestra. Understandably, this Requiem is to a degree reflective, incorporating musical themes drawn from older works that had special meaning to the couple. While Silvestrov's typically glacial tempos are in evidence here, some of the opening half of the piece has an angular spikiness that recalls serial techniques without actively engaging in them. Instrumentally, Requiem for Larissa is dark, atmospheric, and even a little cinematic; the choral parts are sparse and minimally applied. In the fourth-movement Largo, the voices take over and settle down into an ethereal texture that leavens the gloom somewhat, but by this time 25-and-a-half minutes have gone by and some listeners will have already tuned out owing to the toughness of the opening section.Requiem for Larissa is an intensely personal piece performed with respect and care by the Ukrainian National Chorus and Symphony Orchestra under conductor Vladimir Sirenko.

The title of ECM's release of works by three composers born in the former Soviet Union perfectly captures the mood of the CD – it is truly mysterious. Although more than half a century separates the first of these pieces from the most recent, they share a sense of otherness that defies easy explanation. The pieces are not so much mysterious in the sense of being eerie (although there are several moments that might raise the hairs on the back of your neck if you were listening alone in the dark); they are unsettling because they raise more questions than they answer.

On this fascinating new release, violinist Fedor Rudin and pianist Boris Kusnezow perform works by mid-20th-century Russian composers Edison Denisov, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, including previously unpublished music. French-Russian violinist Fedor Rudin explores and pays tribute to his heritage via this rich collection of works, including his own arrangement of Denisov’s orchestration of Debussy’s ‘Prelude and Duo’, which comes from Debussy’s unfinished opera, Rodrigue et Chimène. Other gems include Denisov’s rarely-heard Three concert pieces for violin and piano (1958), and his previously unpublished Sonatina (1972), which marks a return to his melodic youth after the musically experimental interim years. Those years are represented here by Denisov’s dodecaphonic Sonata (1963). We also hear an unfinished Sonata by Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s ‘Hopak’ from his opera Sorochinsky Fair, and Prokofiev’s unusually theatrical Violin Sonata No. 1.