Silvestrov

Valentin Silvestrov is probably the best-known Ukrainian composer, and his "Requiem for Larissa", now released on album by BR-KLASSIK, was written in response to the unexpected death in 1996 of his wife, the music and literature scholar Larissa Bondarenko. She had stood by his side from the very beginning of his artistic career. It was in 1999, shortly before the turn of the millennium, that Silvestrov was finally able to complete his Requiem. He did not set a drama of the Last Judgement to music, as Mozart, Berlioz or Verdi had done before him, but rather wrote a lament - in seemingly endless, world-forlorn repetitions.

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.

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.