Silvestrov: …Flowering Over Lethe…

A Symphony of Moments
This recording presents piano works by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (*1937). Initially one of the most radical representatives of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1960s, he found his individual style and language in the following decade after a creative crisis, often referring indirectly — usually allegorically or metaphorically — to the music of past eras. He defined his new style, in which he still works today, as “metaphorical” and “meta-music”. Small forms such as his so-called Bagatelles for a wide variety of instruments occupy an important place in Silvestrov’s late works. The piano is his favourite. His Bagatellen-Epos,
his own term for an epic collection of bagatelles for piano, now comprises hundreds of opuses, each opus being a cycle of several pieces for which the same titles — Pastorale, Waltz, Lullaby, Serenade, Elegy — are varied. These cycles themselves can be assembled into “cycles of cycles” as the composer or the performer wishes and thus create, in Silvestrov’s own words, “a new type of large-scale form”.
The pianist Alexei Lubimov has been performing Silvestrov’s music — from small pieces to works with orchestra — for more than half a century; on this recording he is not only a performer but also the creator of a larger form as described above, basing it on the idea of an imaginary dialogue between Silvestrov and various composers. The first of these to be created was a cycle that was also named as such: Two Dialogues
with a Postscript (2001-02). It is based on two quotations, the first being Schubert’s so-called Kupelwieser Waltz, which Schubert offered to his friend the Austrian painter Leopold Kupelwieser as a wedding gift and later named after him. Schubert did not notate the waltz, but simply played it. Members of the Kupelwieser family memorised it and passed it down the generations; it was finally transcribed as D. 893 A by Richard Strauss, a friend of Kuperwieser’s descendants, in 1943.