Anyone wanting to explore the mature output of the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov could hardly do better than hear this new Naxos release, featuring a series of works written across a span of 30 years, the majority of them not previously recorded. Ode to a Nightingale, set to a Russian translation of Keats’s poem, dates from 1983, shortly after the completion of the Fifth Symphony, widely regarded as Silvestrov’s finest achievement. The work commences with a flurry of jangling notes, after which the soprano enters, accompanied by sighing pools of luminescent sound from the orchestra and an ongoing sequence of short phrases from woodwind and piano, representing the nightingale. The same sombre and elegiac mood is maintained throughout the work’s 19-minute span, the soprano’s voice supplanted towards the end by the faint sound of laboured breathing.

The one-movement Symphony No 7, completed in 2003, is of similar dimensions but features a greater variety of expression, including an angst-ridden introduction, a romantic cadenza for piano just after the halfway point, and episodes of gentle rumination. A gradual thinning of texture as the work draws to a conclusion gives the impression of music evaporating into thin air, a haunting effect. The two-part Moments of Poetry and Music, composed in 2003, as well as the four-part Cantata No 4 and four-movement Concertino for piano and small orchestra, completed in 2014 and 2015 respectively, find Silvestrov working on a more songlike and intimate scale. Lyricism and nostalgia are the hallmarks of these pieces, a theme maintained even in the 12-note writing for soprano and piano that comprises the first part of Moments of Poetry and Music.

Soprano Inna Galatenko sings ravishingly throughout, and the playing of the two pianists and orchestra under Christopher Lyndon-Gee are extremely fine. A demonstration-class recording and detailed notes by Lyndon-Gee complete a very appealing release.