Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937)
Piano Works
Boris Berman (piano)
rec. 6-9 June 2022, Couvent des Jacobins, Maison Jadot, Beune, France
Le Palais des Dégustateurs PDD020 [2 CDs: 105]
Boris Berman’s recording of Valentin Silvestrov’s piano works has come about as the result of a concert that launched the “Silenced Voices” series organised by the Florida State University College of Music. The central theme of this series is the nature, production, and performance of music under conditions of war and oppression, and it is clear that Silvestrov’s work is shaped at least in part by Ukraine’s turbulent history. This is starkly illustrated by the recent Three Pieces that were composed during his escape from Kyiv to Berlin after the Russian invasion. Berman has a long-standing friendship with the composer: “The first time I met Silvestrov, in the early 1960s, we were both living in the Soviet Union, me in Moscow, him in Kyiv.” Rather than focussing on his later works as has been the case of late, Berman has “decided to offer… a panorama of his oeuvre to showcase the evolution of his musical style over the last six decades.”
This chronological sequence of works is framed by malign Russian influence, the earliest music having been “smuggled out of the Soviet Union [and] performed in New York with the composer’s identity concealed.” These words were regarding Silvestrov’s Suite for Piano from 1961, but might equally be applied to Triade from a year later, the first movement of which, Signs, indeed being part of the former title. This “contraband Soviet 12-tone music” is very much of its time, but Silvestrov’s serialism is not a dry intellectual exercise. This is musical abstraction but with a sense of poetry, angular but filled with colour and creative contrast. The same can be said of Elegy, but with darker hues in its low register notes and a shadow of melancholy throughout. Silvestrov’s dodecaphony was by this time already playing with past echoes in his use of a BACH motif and an ending “with an almost Schumann-esque ellipsis…”
The Second Sonata is a single 18-minute span that draws on quite an eclectic mix of technical and stylistic media that follow “each other within a one-movement rhapsodic poem.” Modernist character crystalises into archaic simplicity, with an improvisatory touch that makes me think of Keith Jarrett. Conventionally played notes combine with sonorities direct from the strings of the piano, and certain chords and sounds repeat and return like the slow rotation of a giant potter’s wheel, with each facet of the worked object appearing different with every turn, and the final bars revealing something magnificent and quite magical.
The Third Sonata is described by Silvestrov as a “sonata-monologue”, which “sums up a decade of works for piano.” Written in three movements, there is an increase in the use of triadic harmony here, but nothing is quite what it seems in a central Fuga that doesn’t sound like a fugue. Silvestrov’s sense of atmosphere and use of quasi-silence is becoming more established in this work, though as ever, that reflectiveness is never a safe space, and we are always on the edge of our seats, waiting for questions to be resolved while suspecting that this will never happen.
You might have come across Kitsch-Musik on Elisaveta Blumina’s lovely Silvestrov album on the Grand Piano label (review), but as there are further no overlaps in the programme this would be a nice compliment to Boris Berman’s collection. Composed in his ‘metaphorical style‘, this cycle of “wordless songs” draws on characteristics of the romantic period, referring to Schumann and Chopin in the first two pieces, and Brahms in the third and fourth. Silvestrov’s instructions are to “play softly (pp) and extremely softly (ppp), as though from afar… It is to be played tenderly and with a deeply inward and discrete sound, as if the music impinges gently on the memory of the listener and so resounds in his deepest consciousness. The composer understands the designation ‘kitsch’ (the weak, unacceptable, unsuccessful) in an elegiac, rather than in an ironic, sense.”
This and the latest works in this remarkable programme can be defined as “making music for oneself”, with a sense that the listener is eavesdropping on a musician as they ruminate at the keyboard late at night, not wanting to disturb those sleeping in their vicinity. Postludium Op. 5 and Five Pieces Op. 306 are recorded at a distance and with the piano lid closed, enhancing this effect and following Silvestrov’s desire for a “light, distant, and soft sound.” These pieces have their origins as ‘bagatelles’ to which the composer, as pianist, returns over a longer period of time to the point at which “they exist, cannot be cancelled, and should be written down.”
Heard here as a world premiere, the final Three Pieces are Silvestrov’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Titled Elegy, Chaconne, and Pastoral, these are quiet expressions of tragic grief, “accepting death with dignity”, and a sense of defiance and hope. Silvestrov’s statements in music seem to admit that you can’t fight missiles and bombs with music, but at the same time survive as evidence that such sounds cannot be destroyed with the same means.
There are not many recordings of Silvestrov’s solo piano music around, though his three Piano Sonatas appear on an Erato release recorded by Alexei Lubimov, and there is a recital by Jenny Lin on the Hänssler Classic label from 2007 if you can find it. This superbly recorded two CD set is nicely presented in a gatefold digipak and with a booklet in English and French with some photos of the composer and pianist sharing musical moments. I hadn’t previously associated Boris Berman with the kind of sensitive playing heard in this recording, but his deep knowledge of Valentin Silvestrov’s aesthetic from the earliest works to the latest make for performances that are filled with nuance and that unique character that can turn the complex and abstract towards the poetic, and that can turn simplicity into sophistication; enhancing these pieces’ creative message while giving the impression of being a humble vehicle for their effective performance.
Dominy Clements
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Contents
Triade (1961-66)
Elegy (1967)
Sonata 2 (1975)
Sonata 3 (1977)
Kitsch-Music (1977)
Postludium op. 5 (2005)
Five Pieces Op. 306 (2021)
Three pieces (March 2022, Berlin)
