Silvestrov

Valentin Silvestrov - Sacred Works (2009) {ECM New Series 2117}
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© 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”.

Valentin Silvestrov’s elusive post-modern style is rich in nostalgia for the lost music of a barely remembered past filled with beauty and spiritual aspiration. "Ode to a Nightingale is a masterly response to Keats’ unsentimental reflection on human mortality, contrasting with the beauty and affecting intimacy of the Cantata No. 4 and the resonant emotional world of its companion piece, the Concertino. Starkness set against elegiac melancholy are the shared features of Moments of Poetry and Music and the Seventh Symphony—an embodiment of Silvestrov’s dual musical nature of anguish and tenderness.

Ukranian composer Valentin Silvestrov has said that I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists. This is particularly pertinent to works such as the Two Dialogues with Postscript that engage hauntingly with Schubert and Wagner, and the evocative Moments of Memory II which alludes to Chopin and yearns for an unreachable past. Music is still song, even if one cannot literally sing it, says Silvestrov.

Hélène Grimaud headlines a spectacular evening with the illustrious Camerata Salzburg, directed from the front desk by concertmaster Giovanni Guzzo, at the famed Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. She selected pieces that are all in minor keys yet composed during intensely creative periods in both Mozart’s and Schumann’s careers. Mozart did not write many works in minor tonalities but Grimaud chose it, because it “provides a glimpse behind the mask of jollity that surrounds many of his famous works.“ As an encore: a work by another composer to have accompanied Grimaud through much of her career, Valentin Silvestrov. “Hélène Grimaud and the Salzburg Camerata hypnotise the audience in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie on this unforgettable evening with piano concertos of the early romantic era of Mozart and Schumann that are unique in terms of sound.“ (operaversum.de)

"…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