Valentyn Silvestrov (b. 1937)
The Messenger
The Messenger (1996)
Post Scriptum, Sonata for Violin and Piano (1990)
Three Pieces (Melodies of the Moments, cycle 2) (2005)
Piano Sonata No 2 (1975)
Hommage à J.S.B. for Violin and Piano (quasi echo) (2009)
Epitaphium (L. B.) (1999)
Five Pieces (Melodies of the Moments, cycle 1) (2004)
Daniel Rowland (violin), Maja Bogdanović (cello), Borys Fedorov (piano)
rec. 2022 at Bethlehemskerk, Amsterdam
Challenge Classics CC72939 [82]
Valentyn Silvestrov is the grand old man of Ukrainian music. He is one of a group of East European composers, who also include the Georgian Giya Kancheli and the Estonian Arvo Pärt, who grew up under the Soviet system, then discovered European modernism, after which they developed their own idioms. Silvestrov has had an international reputation for some time, from well before recent events forced himself and his country into prominence. He has been reasonably well recorded, and the ECM label, in particular, has done him proud, having issued at least ten discs of his music. Nevertheless, the availability of some of his works, especially the symphonies, is patchy, though not the fifth, probably his masterpiece, which has been recorded several times.
SIlvestrov has written: ‘I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists.’ Indeed, in nearly everything of his that I have heard, there is an evocation of previous music, together with an aching sense of nostalgia, as if to say: ‘Didn’t it go a bit like this, a long time ago, when we were happy?’ That is certainly true of most of this disc, which is of his chamber music, mainly for violin and piano.
Two works were written in memory of his wife, Larissa Bondarenko, a musicologist, who died in 1996. The first is The Messenger, which gives its title to the disc as a whole. The opening of this sounds like Mozart, and Silvestrov’s skill is such that you almost think it is Mozart, before moving into a more distant and rarefied idiom. The piece is very lyrical and is deeply moving. So is the other work written as a tribute, Epitaphium (L. B.), which is for cello, rather than violin, with piano. The piano opens with dark sonorities in the extreme bass before the cello joins in the lament.
Post Scriptum is a sonata for violin and piano in three movements. Silvestrov said that the title means it is ‘a postscript to Mozart and the whole classical tradition.’ The opening movement is much the longest and is a kind of memory of a classical sonata movement. The middle Andantino has an extended and very beautiful melody. The finale begins fast but gradually fades out with wisps of melody.
Hommage à J. S. B. is a somewhat similar, though much shorter, evocation, this time of Bach, also in three movements. It takes phrases from Bach and reworks them in a way which is both modern and respectful.
Silvestrov wrote an extended set of miniatures, with the overall title Melodies of the Moments. This is divided into seven cycles, of which we get the first, Five Pieces, which end the disc, and the second, Three Pieces, which come earlier. They are all quiet and evocative and in a modified late romantic idiom: the Three Pieces evoke the spirits of Schumann and Brahms, and the Five Pieces those of Fauré and Franck. However, they are not pastiche, any more than the Messenger is pastiche Mozart.
In addition to these chamber works, we also get Silvestrov’s second piano sonata, in one movement. This is a much earlier work, and it begins in the splintered post-Webernian manner which was briefly popular with composers in those years. There are some other modernist devices employed, such as using the palms of the hands directly on the open strings, and there is a higher level of dissonance than in the other works here. However, this is not more challenging than, say, the later piano sonatas of Tippett. The nostalgic and evocative manner of the other works is absent here. I am not sure whether this is a wholly successful work, but it is certainly an interesting one.
The performances here are a labour of love. Daniel Rowland, formerly the leader of the Brodsky Quartet, describes in the booklet how he fell in love with Silvestrov’s music through hearing a performance of The Messenger. The Ukrainian pianist Borys Fedorov has an international career mainly in Eastern Europe and has also been a professor of piano at Kiev State Conservatory; he caught the last flight out of Kiev to Amsterdam on the eve of the Russian invasion. He knows this music from the inside. The cellist Maja Bogdanović is Serbian, now based in Amsterdam where she is the partner of Daniel Rowland and has her own flourishing career. Her contribution is in keeping with the others. The recording is clear, atmospheric and not too close. The booklet is useful, but does not clarify that the Five Pieces and Three Pieces are both cycles from Melodies of the Moments, and I had to do some research to sort this out.
There are other recordings of most of the works here, notably by Gidon Kremer, but not together on one disc. This is a valuable collection.
Stephen Barber
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