Valentin Silvestrov: Evening Serenade [DSD Single]

Full Album Release Date: Friday, May 22

From an explosion to nearly silence. Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937) had a somewhat unconventional beginning to his career as a composer, in that he began his education at the Kyiv Civil Engineering Institute before switching to the Kyiv Conservatory. His early style was avant-garde and varied, leading to his music being suppressed and/or ignored in his own country. Over the years, though, his international acclaim grew, not least in the West.

Dmitry Matvienko sees a clear shift in Silvestrov’s music with Meditation for cello and chamber orchestra in 1972, marking the beginning of a new style: “From this point forwards, his music is a reflection on time, on personality, on the creation of cosmos,” Matvienko says, and points out how these characteristics are present in almost all of Silvestrov’s subsequent works: the Fourth (1976) and Fifth (1982) Symphonies, Silent Songs (1977), Cantata for a cappella chorus to a poem by T. Shevchenko (1976), Forest Music to a poem by G. Aiga (1978), Simple Songs (1981), Four Songs to a poem by O. Mandelstam.

During the last couple of decades, Silvestrov has left the avant-garde behind him altogether and is now working in a style he has named “metamusic” (short for “metaphorical music”). He considers this a universal style and a universal language, “a general ‘dictionary’ that belongs to no one but can be used by anyone in his or her own way,” the composer says. “I believe that Music – even if it cannot be ‘sung’, is song nevertheless; it is neither philosophy nor a world view, it is the song of the world about itself, as it were a musical testimony to existence.” In Quiet Music (“Stille Musik” / “Tikhaya Musika”), infinite cadencing is used to create music incarnating a sense of “waiting”.

Aarhus Symphony Orchestra
Dmitry Matvienko – conductor