Newcomers to Silvestrov start here. Devotees of the New Euphony who respond to the aura of spirituality but are wary of cop-out imitations, welcome to the real thing, or at least one superb example of it. Sceptics beware – this could be your road to Damascus.
All you need, or may need, by way of preparation, is a reminder that nostalgia has never been a dirty word for Russians (or in this case, for a Ukrainian). More than that, the preservation of memory has been a running thread of their music, from Mussorgsky to the present day. It can be memory of childhood, of first love, of a first apprehension of beauty, or whatever; and it’s sharpened by experiences of oppression which can take just as many forms.
Kitsch Music. What a title! And what a delicate balancing act these little piano pieces are. The first fuses a half-remembered Schubert Impromptu and a Schumann Scene from Childhood, the second is a paraphrase of a Chopin Prelude. Their fragile beauty threatens to evaporate at the slightest wrong step, and Irina Plotnikova brings to them a ravishing other-worldliness. If you want to hear all five pieces, you can try Alexei Lubimov on BIS in even more disembodied performances but with a swimmier acoustic.
The First String Quartet was written three years earlier, in 1974, when Silvestrov still had one foot in the Soviet Union’s modernist-dissident mainstream, if I can use the paradox. An amalgam of Death and the Maiden and Verklarte Nacht figurations near the beginning is confronted with irreconcilable dissonances which quietly but inexorably bring the piece to a standstill. The figurations then recur in a coda of sorrowful, spectral regression. The Lysenko Quartet of Kiev are the dedicatees, and dedication is the word for their superbly intense and beautifully blended performance. They can also be heard in a more recent, even more spacious and less artificially recorded account on Etcetera, with more Silvestrov quartet music. (By the way, the name Lysenko comes from the Ukrainian composer Nikolay rather than the infamous Stalinist geneticist, Trofim.)
Like Tippett’s Fourth Symphony, Silvestrov’s Fifth opens by making ripples in a lake of shimmering harmonic complexity. Where Tippett responds with evocations of ‘power’ and ‘grace’, Silvestrov looks into the ripples and enters a realm of magic healing melodies, at once familiar-seeming and tantalizingly ungraspable. If you can, ask your record dealer to let you hear from about 9'30'' to 16'30'', and if that doesn’t cast a spell, forget it. Just beyond that point you’ll find an ecstatic dream-fantasy spun around the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth, and from about 21'00'' there’s even a hint of Tippett’s evocation of ‘human breath’. In fact every five minutes or so Silvestrov seems to discover another layer of unsuspected beauty. But for me the mastery of the piece resides not just in its hypnotic sensitivity to harmonic and timbral nuance, not just in the aching beauty of its protracted Mahlerian leave-taking, but in its subtle structural overlaps. They create the impression of a realm where Past, Present and Future are mysteriously reconciled.
I mentioned the “trance-like beauty” of the 1986 Kiev Conservatoire performance when welcoming the excellent recent Sony Classical version. In fact there’s little to choose between the two accounts – only a matter of a few seconds when it comes to overall duration. Momentary waverings from the Ukrainian trumpeter are the only indication of a less than fully professional performance, and to anyone who hesitated over the symphony before, I would recommend the Melodiya reissue for its total identification with the inner world of the piece.'