Saturday, February 9, 2019

Brilliant Classics Discovers Valentin Silvestrov

Composer Valentin Silvestrov at the piano (photograph by Smerus, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Unless I am mistaken, last month was the second time that Brilliant Classics released an album of music by a composer who first came to attention thanks to the efforts of Manfred Eicher’s ECM New Series releases. As might be guessed, the first time involved the composer Arvo Pärt when, at the end of 2013, Brilliant released a two-CD set of the “complete piano music” by Pärt performed by Dutch pianist Jeroen van Veen. Last month Brilliant released Touching the Memory, an album of compositions for piano and strings in different combinations, all by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.

Silvestrov’s name is frequently linked with Pärt’s as well as that of Giya Kancheli, another composer that has benefited significantly from ECM New Series recordings. Indeed, on Touching the Memory, each of these two composers is the dedicatee of a Silvestrov composition. The earlier of these is “Hymn-2001,” composed for string orchestra in 1999 and dedicated to Kancheli. The second is the Opus 64 set of three postludes for solo piano, composed in 2005 and dedicated to Pärt. The other “ECM connection” comes from the pianist on Touching the Memory, Alexei Lubimov, who is the pianist for the performance of “Zwei Dialoge mit Nachwort” on the ECM Bagatellen und Serenaden album of Silvestrov’s music. (This was my own “first contact” with Silvestrov.)

According to my records, most of what I have written in the past about Silvestrov was for Examiner.com, meaning that those articles were purged from the Web when AXS shut down Examiner.com operations. On this site, however, I revisited Silvestrov in November of 2017, when ECM released Hieroglyphen der Nacht, an album of compositions for either solo cello (Anja Lechner) or cello duo (Lechner and Agnès Vesterman). What is important is that I was able to approach Touching the Memory with a relatively rich background of past listening experiences.

I should therefore begin by repeating an observation made about Hieroglyphen der Nacht, which is that Silvestrov’s compositions “require a rather intense approach to focused listening.” This is also true of both Pärt and Kancheli, which is one reason why these three names often get to share a common phrase in a declarative sentence. However, each of the composers orients that focused listening in a different direction.

What makes Silvestrov interesting is that his recordings suggest that the process of making the recording is as relevant as that of playing the instrument(s) required by the score. All of the recordings on Touching the Memory were made at the Dada Studio Brussels (Belgium). For each of the tracks, reverberation figures as significantly as the attack and decay properties of each of the notes. I have no idea whether those sounds of reverberation come from the Dada space itself or from the capture technology; but, as a result of all of my past listening experiences, I have concluded that those reverberations are as much a part of each composition, whether coming from Lubimov’s piano work or the strings of the Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles conducted by Jean-Paul Dessy, as the physical ways in which the instruments translate pitch classes into sounds.

Back when I was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working at the campus radio station, I would sometimes bring fellow students over to listen to an album I was thinking about airing. I remember once doing this with a recording of John Cage. After a few minutes, my friend said, “I get what he’s doing. It’s cool. What’s next?” At the risk of sounding too academic, I would say that this was a case of listening to the process while ignoring the product. Silvestrov requires a listener willing to attend to both process and product, treating the two as inextricably linked. I am not sure I can think of any other composer whose works require that kind of focus while listening; and, to be fair, it takes more than a bit of experience to get into that kind of groove.

From that point of view, Touching the Memory provides as good an opportunity for building up such an experience base for Silvestrov as one is likely to find.

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