Helene Grimed Plays Valentin Silvestrov

Silvestrov wrote the pieces recorded here, scored for piano solo, string orchestra, and piano and strings, between 1996 and 2005, and they are all representative of his late, meditative, song-like style. After an early career as an experimentalist, Silvestrov embraced the radical simplicity – a style of tonal, melodic, and rhythmic transparency – that has won him many admirers in the general public, but little recognition by the academic community. It would be easy to hear his music as derivative, given the limited tonal palette to which he restricts himself; his apparently naïve and artless approach, however, has an integrity and a genuinely lyrical impulse that make it hard to dismiss.

Valentin Silvestrov - Symphony No. 6
Beethoven Orchester Bonn - Roman Kofman
SACD ISO: 2,6 GB (Stereo + MCH DSD) | FLAC @ 24bit/88.2kHz: 770 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Rec. Info
Label/Cat#: MDG "Gold" # 937 1478-6 | Country/Year: Germany 2007
Genre: Classical | Style: Contemporary

…the Bonn orchestra and the Ukrainian conductor create a performance that might conceivably do for Silvestrov what Bernstein did for Mahler: turn him into a superstar. As always, Musik Dabringhaus und Grimm's digital recording is as real as it gets.

Valentin Silvestrov - Symphony No. 6
Beethoven Orchester Bonn - Roman Kofman
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 155 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: MDG "Gold" # 937 1478-6 | Country/Year: Germany 2007
Genre: Classical | Style: Contemporary

…the Bonn orchestra and the Ukrainian conductor create a performance that might conceivably do for Silvestrov what Bernstein did for Mahler: turn him into a superstar. As always, Musik Dabringhaus und Grimm's digital recording is as real as it gets.

With Maidan, Valentin Silvestrov continues his longstanding association with ECM and this time presents a programme of choir music that is as timely as it is dear to the Ukrainian composer’s heart. Like the albums Sacred Songs and Sacred Works, Maidan embraces Silvestrov’s composing for vocal ensemble and captures the Kyiv Chamber Choir under Mykola Hobdych in an impassioned performance at the St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv from 2016. Silvestrov, who in spring 2022 had to leave his Kyiv home of over half a century, composed “Maidan 2014”, a ‘cycle of cycles’, in the wake of the ‘Euromaidan’ – the wave of demonstrations that hit Ukraine in 2014. Replete with liturgical passages and verses by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchencko, Maidan offers a wealth of melodies with both hymnal and chant-like structures. In the CD’s liner text, Silvestrov points out how “it’s no accident that the symbolic crown and ending of the “Maidan 2014” cycle is a quiet lullaby. For I’m neither able nor willing to duplicate the noise of this terrible war. Instead, I want to show how fragile our civilisation is. I try, with my music, to safeguard and preserve a day of peace.” The album is released as Silvestrov turns 85.

"…a large cycle, comprised of seven works, which are performed without interruption – as one large text. For me in this work, there is a certain analogy with Bach's cycle "The Art of the Fugue"; in Bach's work the didactic idea and its application are primary. I could have called this cycle "The Art of the Melody", but in this name the didactic idea is missing and only the "art" is represented; thus "fleeting melodies" – the expanse, in which melodies exist on the boundary between their appearance and disappearance…"

Valentin Silvestrov

Valentin Silvestrov - Sacred Works (2009) {ECM New Series 2117}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 261 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 175 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 11 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2009 ECM Records | ECM New Series 2117
Classical / Choral

Since 2001, ECM has enthusiastically championed the art of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov with recordings of his orchestral, chamber and vocal works – creations that stand as some of the most arresting and moving in contemporary music. This continues in Silvestrov’s 75th birthday year with “Sacred Songs”, the seventh album ECM has devoted wholly to the composer’s music; it collects sets of songs, refrains, psalms and prayers composed from 2006 to 2008 that reflect the composer’s late-blooming interest in writing for a cappella voices, which led previously to the ECM releases “Requiem for Larissa” and “Sacred Works”.