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Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov fled his hometown of Kyiv for Berlin in early 2022.
Dmitri Matveyev/Naxos
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Dmitri Matveyev/Naxos
Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov fled his hometown of Kyiv for Berlin in early 2022.
Dmitri Matveyev/Naxos
Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov virtually did not make it out of his hometown of Kyiv at the start of the 2022 Russian invasion. First, his daughter needed to persuade him to flee to security; then, each practice was too packed to board. Fortunately, an acquaintance spied him and drove, by way of again roads, to the Polish border, the place he caught a practice to Berlin.
If you do not know the 86-year-old composer’s music, a brand new album by conductor Christopher Lyndon-Gee and the Lithuanian Nationwide Symphony Orchestra makes a sonically satisfying place to begin. It accommodates a pair of symphonic works that embody two recurring concepts for Silvestrov: that an finish may also be a starting, and that candy, nostalgic music can thrive alongside concussive eruptions.
In Postludium for Piano and Orchestra, the composer basically gives an ending, a “postlude,” that turns into one thing model new by mixing the avant-garde with old-school romanticism. The piece convulses in orchestral earthquakes of low brass (full with aftershocks), however ultimately offers approach to delicate music that yearns for the long-ago fantastic thing about Mozart.
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The extra expansive work on the album is a 44-minute symphony for violin and orchestra titled Dedication. Who’s it devoted to? Lyndon-Gee, writing within the album’s booklet, treats it as an homage to the “life-force” of the human race — which encompasses not solely tragedy, but additionally love and renewal. And but for Silvestrov, he says, “Every part is a postlude to that which is slipping, inevitably and unceasingly, from between our fingers.”
In Dedication, the violin — performed with unwavering element by Janusz Wawrowski — just isn’t battling in opposition to the orchestra for domination, as in a typical concerto. As an alternative, the 2 protagonists complement one another, respiratory as a single organism in Silvestrov’s colossal exhalations of sound. Nice waves of percussion crest over a spiky violin, a reminder that Silvestrov’s early works from the Nineteen Sixties had been thought of too avant-garde for Soviet-era officers.
Silvestrov has created his personal sound world, charged with turbulence and bittersweet fragments of melody that may seem to be quotes from different composers, however aren’t. Close to the top of Dedication, an elegiac theme, paying homage to Gustav Mahler, emerges within the strings, struggling to rise ever greater by way of a darkish cloud of roiling harmonies.
It is a tragic irony, however Silvestrov’s inventory has risen because the Russian onslaught. He is now the de facto musical spokesperson for his homeland, and extra persons are listening to his music. The day after he discovered himself in exile in Berlin, he started composing once more, most certainly considering of the previous — of endings and beginnings which are undoubtedly discovering their means into his extraordinary music.
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