# Valentin Silvestrov



## michael walsh

I have just once CD (Nostalgia) but it is a favourite; especially his 'Wedding Walt', which for sheer charm is equal to anything by Chopin.


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## Scott Good

An absolutely amazing composer!

The 5th symphony is a masterpiece - as well as the piano concerto. There is something incredibly deep and emotional in this music. He is a composer who knows perfectly well the balance between too much and too little.

You have inspired me to go and listen to some! It has been a couple of years.


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## TresPicos

I just heard my first Silvestrov piece the other day, the Diptychon. Amazing stuff!


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## Art Rock

I love the 5th symphony, and the song cycle Quiet songs.


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## robert

Check out 
Bagatellen und Serenaden

ECM 1988

Robert


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## Earthling

robert said:


> Check out
> Bagatellen und Serenaden
> 
> ECM 1988
> 
> Robert


Yes, what a lovely album.

On another ECM album is his *Postlude No. 3* for cello and piano. I love how his music gently disintegrates or simply "runs out" of notes. The brief Postlude No. 3 is just heartbreaking.


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## Neo Romanza

Biography
Born: September 30, 1937; Kiev, Ukraine 
"Music is still song, even if one cannot literally sing it: it is not a philosophy, not a world-view. It is, above all, a chant, a song the world sings about itself, it is the musical testimony to life." -- Valentin Silvestrov

It's not at all hard to hear the image of a "world singing itself its own song" in Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov's works. His string quartets, his songs, and his masterful symphonies all radiate with the slow steady force of a rotating planet, spinning lonesomely in the void. The notion that these vast, lethargic bodies sing to themselves as they turn, and we hear their music as a symphony or song cycle, admittedly carries an aspect of Romantic fancy to it. But the image also voices a serious metaphor for Silvestrov -- the concept of "meta-music," a music which hovers around, above, and especially after all other musics, like an atmosphere encircling a post-apocalyptic globe. Silvestrov has written much about the idea of "coda" and "epilogue" in his music, that place in which there is "a gathering of resonances, a form which is open." This coda-state is for Silvestrov "not the end of music as an art, but the end of music, an end in which it can linger for a very long time. It is very much in the area of the coda that immense life is possible." Hence Silvestrov's "metaphorical style" from the 1970s onwards: a body of slow, lovely, and astoundingly detailed "postludes," emanating the air of a Mahler adagio through vast waves of time and subtle decay.

Valentin Vasil'yevich Silvestrov was born in Kiev, Ukraine, on September 30, 1937, arguably the darkest year in the Russian history. He came rather late to music, beginning study at 15, first privately and then at an evening music school. By 1955, he graduated with a gold medal and enrolled at the Kiev Institute of Construction Engineering; but three years later Silvestrov began serious pursuit of music at the Kiev Conservatory, studying with Lyatoshyns'ky and Revutsky. Even with earliest works like the Piano Quintet (1961), Silvestrov was already drawn to the dramatic potential in contrasting strong tonality with strong atonality; in his massive Third Symphony "Eskhatofoniya" (1966), this preoccupation with polarities took the form of "cultural" (strictly notated) sounds and "mysterious" (improvised) ones. The place of magic and invocation -- those elements that always defy material, that arise only in the process and afterwards -- began to rest more firmly in Silvestrov's works.

1971's gigantic Drama for piano trio -- "virtually a clinical study of an artistic crisis," Silvestrov's biographer writes -- was a breakthrough work. And it was beginning in 1973 that Silvestrov embarked on his "metaphorical" or "allegorical" style, strongly reminiscent of late-Romantic cliché, to which he still adheres today -- "metaphorical" because Silvestrov knows these sounds to be irrefutably "past" and has no interest in merely "resurrecting" them; and "allegorical," because Silvestrov wishes to use this music obliquely, as an estranged means rather than a predictable end.

Silvestrov's Symphony No. 5 of 1982 is perhaps an ideal symbol of this style: in its three-quarter-hour cycle of nine slow movements, it "recycles" a whole world of banal, almost kitschy melodies on its scarred, cloudy surface. But underneath this floating music lies a tremendous complexity, both technically and emotionally; the accumulative expressive effect is undeniable and unexpected. Malcolm MacDonald perhaps put it best when he wrote that the "Russian sense of lamentation...reaches in Silvestrov a new expressive stage: he seems to compose, not the lament itself, but the lingering memory of it, the mood of sadness that it leaves behind."

[Taken from Arkivmusic]


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## Neo Romanza

Silvestrov is one of those composers I have to listen to in moderation and this isn't meant as a criticism of the composer but rather that the music is so heartbreakingly beautiful and emotionally painful that I can't listen to it in large doses. Listened to his _Symphony No. 5_ this afternoon as it's been a year or so since I heard the work and I loved every minute of it. His music isn't about at getting from point A to point B or even the development of those two points, but, rather, a music that floats down the river being guided by the natural current. The whole idea of time standing still is also very much the effect that I get from Silvestrov's music.


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## Neo Romanza

An interesting documentary about Silvestrov:


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## joen_cph

Comprehensive interview with Silvestrov, in French, from December 2014:

http://evroforum.com/?p=1746&lang=fr


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## Composer Kid

I hope he will be remembered as one of the greatest composers of his generation. One of my favorite composers. Period. I like what someone^ said about listening to him in moderation. It's true that listening to Silvestrov is like committing to putting everything down and getting lost in space and time for an hour. His neo-romantic style which he has developed is unlike anything else I've heard and his orchestration abilities are genius imo. Favorites include the masterful Symphony 5, Dedication (a violin Concerto), Post Scriptum (violin Sonata), Stufen (beautiful song cycle), etc. Basically if you are in any kind of a sentimental, somewhat melancholic mood, try Silvestrov out, you won't regret it. (PS in music school I took orchestration and on the first day, without telling us what it was, or teacher played an excerpt from Dedication. From then on, I've been hooked.)


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## Azol

I wonder if any of his large-scale works after Symphony 7 will be slated for release. I know of at least one public performance of Symphony 8, but I am not sure if it has been recorded. Such a shame.


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## jcazador

check out this site
i believe it is Silvestrov's, in Kiev
you can buy recordings of his work played by the man himself
https://silvestrov.bandcamp.com/


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## DeepR

I've played the 5th symphony quite a number of times and I enjoyed it at first, but ultimately I find it a rather empty work, where the sparse material is too stretched out and the rest is just atmospheric filler with some suspenseful, dissonant moments thrown in between just for the sake of it. When the main theme finally arrives in full near the end, it is absolutely gorgeous, but the rest of the symphony is not worth the wait.
I prefer my music to be either fully atmospheric and textural (ambient), or more traditional, fully developed, with strong thematic and melodic content and a sense of direction... this piece falls somewhere in between.


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## CnC Bartok

Nobody seems to have mentioned his immensely touching and very beautiful Requiem for Larissa. It's a lovely piece.


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## Rogerx

Never ever heard of the man.


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## tortkis

UKRAINE'S TOP COMPOSER IS RESCUED
Norman Lebrecht, March 09, 2022
_The conductor Andrey Boreyko has posted a picture of the evacuation yesterday from Ukraine of the senior composer Valentin Silvestrov._
https://slippedisc.com/2022/03/ukraines-top-composer-is-rescued/


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## joen_cph

Deutsche Well published a Silvestrov interview about the escape and the situation (in German):

https://www.dw.com/de/valentin-silv...DMSooyqIBS_yslcRApaOesuF-iSjZsQ4AytqPvANjRORo


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## PeterFromLA

Glad to know he's okay.


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