{"id":4172,"date":"2019-05-12T16:06:42","date_gmt":"2019-05-12T23:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=4172"},"modified":"2019-05-14T05:16:16","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T12:16:16","slug":"time-pauses-for-valentin-silvestrov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2019\/05\/time-pauses-for-valentin-silvestrov.html","title":{"rendered":"Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov"},"content":{"rendered":"

A quarter century ago, a New England journalist named Milton Moore turned me \u2013 a lover of rock and jazz without much interest in music before Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker \u2013 on to Schubert, late Beethoven, and The Well-Tempered Clavier.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/em>Milton, who has been reviewing music, classical and otherwise, since the \u201870s, today starts a more-or-less monthly column about contemporary and \u201calternative\u201d classical music. At least for the first few installments, he will be concentrating on composers whose work deserves more attention. His first installment is on the music of Valentin Silvestrov.<\/em><\/p>\n

 *       *       *<\/p>\n

You\u2019re sure to find a comfortable spot to nestle into the sprawling body of work by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. His compositions range from the conventionally outrageous to the outrageously conventional, and few composers today write with more transporting and direct lyricism.<\/p>\n

The 81-year-old Silvestrov has published more than 100 works, including 28 for orchestra (six symphonies), 20 chamber works, and song cycles, piano works and large choral works. More than 36 CDs of his works have been recorded, including nine on the irreplaceable ECM label.<\/p>\n

Silvestrov was a mid-Sixties bad boy, much like Russia\u2019s Alfred Schnitkke, writing spare, percussive, and antagonistic orchestral works that were suppressed in his own country while being praised in the West, his prickly Symphony No. 3 winning the 1967 Koussevitzky Prize.<\/p>\n

Then, in the Seventies, Silvestrov changed. He began to write what he called \u201ckitsch music.\u201d Musicologist and composer Svetlana Savenko writes that Silvestrov coached his performers that \u201cit should be played in a very tender and heartfelt way\u201d and directed the baritone performing \u201cSilent Songs\u201d cycle \u201cto sing as if singing to himself.\u201d This calm and utterly introspective approach is hardly the stuff hits are made of, yet it is uniquely affecting.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Robert Masotti\/ECM<\/p><\/div>\n

I can\u2019t think of a living composer who writes more consistently entrancing songs and piano works spun of long, often indefinite melodic lines, dreamlike and drifting like watching smoke from a fire\u2019s dying embers. He has titled several works as postludes, reflecting his elegiac and nostalgic sense that he stands amid the detritus of artistic eras. Alfred Schnittke surveyed that wreckage and despaired. Silvestrov instead sings hymns to it, hazy recollections of a reverence for the fading memories.<\/p>\n

Henry James mused that as we think of our pasts, we do not recall events, but our memories of events, multilayered and changeable with each retrieval and each return to storage. So it is with Silvestrov\u2019s nostalgia, his affection for nostalgia itself. Silvestrov shares with Schnittke a commitment to postmodernism, a belief that every musical inventor has expounded every musical concept for so many centuries that allegiance to any style is marginalizing. Schnittke called his approach \u201cpolystylism.\u201d Silvestrov calls his \u201cmetamusic,\u201d the cosmos of musical ideas.<\/p>\n

In 1984, Schnittke famously wrote that learning Serialism was a rite of puberty for a young free thinker of the Sixties, \u201cthe unavoidable proof of masculinity through Serial self-denial.\u201d He added, \u201cHaving arrived at that final station, I decided to get off the already overcrowded train. Since then, I have tried to proceed on foot.\u201d Silvestrov rephrased the same sentiment: \u201cThe most important lesson of the avant-garde was to be free of all preconceived ideas \u2013 particularly those of the avant-garde.\u201d<\/p>\n

Silvestrov\u2019s avant garde period is not to be dismissed. From it evolved his grand symphonies \u2013 Nos. Four to Eight \u2013 that are vaster, with denser orchestration and more obvious thematic cores than his Third. Each of these rich sonic events opens with a dissonant catastrophe and spans one long arc, each drama opening as if at the conclusion, the smoking rubble of a ruined soundscape, ominous and uneasy. From these growling sonic tectonic plates, haunting melodic motifs rise and sink back into the mass. His Fifth Symphony<\/a> is the finest of the lot, its melodic motifs that rise from darkness in low brass stirringly Wagnerian in both character and soaring reach.<\/p>\n

But it is Silvestrov\u2019s song cycles and piano works, his kitsch, that I return to again and again. His \u201cSilent Songs\u201d were the first in this series of simple works that have that Schubertian ability to distort time. You find yourself holding your breath. Even his most direct melodies are fleeting, as if glimpsed from a train window. British critic Malcolm MacDonald wrote that Silvestrov writes not the lament itself \u201cbut the lingering memory of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

To sample this music, I suggest three discs.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

First, the song disc \u201cStufen\u201d with pianist Alexei Lubimov and mezzo Jana Ivanilova, on the hard to find Megadisc label that can be streamed for pay at Amazon or free at Spotify, settings of poetry from the likes of Keats and Pushkin. The echoing sonic ambience adds a shimmering haze to the nostalgia, a disc so intimate the listener feels almost an eavesdropper, as you can hear on “Elegy.”<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And second, \u201cNostalghia\u201d itself, a disc of piano works on the H\u00e4nssler Classic label recorded by the wonderful Jenny Lin (she of that insightful and fresh 2007 Shostakovich preludes and fugues). Lin is unhurried and luxurious in her phrasing, whether in the halting reverie of the title track<\/a>, the haunting slow movement from Piano Sonata No. 1, or the three sweet tributes to the Serialists, that make you wish the Serialists themselves had such heart and sensitivity. The unabashedly Classical \u201cThe Messenger\u201d for solo piano might seem a parody, were it not so utterly pleasing.<\/p>\n

In recent years, Silvestrov has expanded his sonic scale with choral compositions rooted in Orthodox tradition and advancing the composer\u2019s gift for achingly evanescent melodic constructs. ECM has released a pair of recordings with Mykola Hobdych leading the Kiev Chamber Choir in these a cappella gems, the first of which BBC critic Michael Quinn called simply \u201cravishing.\u201d Sample the Ave Maria<\/a>, you\u2019ll agree.<\/p>\n

Silvestrov\u2019s music could be grouped with P\u00e4rt and G\u00f3recki, but that misrepresents his unique approach to melody. He is far less given to minimalist sequencing than these other Eastern mystics. Silvestrov\u2019s music is perhaps anachronistic, but the question isn\u2019t, why do we need more traditionally beautiful tonal music? The question should be, why would you turn away from this?<\/p>\n

\u2013 Milton Moore<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A quarter century ago, a New England journalist named Milton Moore turned me \u2013 a lover of rock and jazz without much interest in music before Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker \u2013 on to Schubert, late Beethoven, and The Well-Tempered Clavier.  Milton, who has been reviewing music, classical and otherwise, since the \u201870s, today starts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[54,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4172","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-classical-music","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry","9":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4172"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4193,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4172\/revisions\/4193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}