CD ECM Records Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs

2004

Sergey Yakovenko - bariton
Ilya Scheps - pian

Valentin Silvestrov:
- Silent Songs: I. Five Songs
- Silent Songs: II. Eleven Songs
- Silent Songs: III. Three Songs
- Silent Songs: IV. Five Songs
- Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam

Following the chamber music album “leggiero, pesante”, the orchestral “Metamusik/Postludium”, and the “Requiem for Larissa”, ECM New Series is pleased to present a most remarkable recording of Valentin Silvestrov’s “Stille Lieder”, a song cycle of great importance in the development and perception of the Ukrainian composer’s work, in a double album that also includes the premiere recording of his “Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam”.“We may feel we have always known these songs,” writes Paul Griffiths in the liner notes to the “Silent Songs”, “and in a sense we have. The first hearing will not seem the first, though we will remember it for that slow shock of familiarity, how it awakens memories… Yet the songs are new – startlingly new for 1974-77, when composers in the Soviet Union were stretching boundaries…Just when composers could at last make big personal statement in public, here was one letting the past express itself, in the private dimensions of whispered song”.

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“Silent Songs” is a 24-song cycle dating from 1974-77, and is a grand gamble. For its entirety, almost two hours, its tempo is moderately slow, its texture open and spare, its dynamic hushed. … The actual music is a sort of distilled late-Romantic tonality. The piano accompaniment is made of delicately shaped arpeggios. The harmonies are studded with appoggiaturas (downbeat dissonances that resolve) and surprising (but satisfying) substitutions for where one would expect a progression to go. … Yakovenko is stunning in both his intensity and restraint, and Scheps is an ideally sensitive accompanist … A remarkable, rare flower of a piece.
Robert Carl, Fanfare

…there is a timeless quality in the music.
Sergey Yakovenko, the baritone in the recording, delivers a wonderfully husky, richly layered tonality, in music that seems to range from medieval chant to Russian art song (especially Mussorgsky) and on to a dreamy contemporary consciousness. This song recital is unlike any other I have ever heard and truly mesmerizing.
Peter Burwasser, Philadelphia City Paper, November 11-17, 2004

Silvestrov freely anthologizes his poems – many of which have acquired a familiarity transcending time and nationality – so that a veritable network of semantic and emotional cross-references results. Unifying this network musically is the manner in which texts are set and are designed to be sung. The vocal writing, closely following their metre and expressive contour, is delivered sotto voce in a hushed, intimate manner – as though confiding thoughts and feelings directly to the listener – while the simple, chordal piano parts are instructed to be played with the una corda pedal down. This serves to heighten the impact of the cycle when heard (as it ideally needs to be) complete, imparting to it a consistency that vitiates any attempt to describe individual songs or discern an underlying tension and release across the whole. Rather, the aura of this music is its most significant factor, communicating qualities that may have been, or are about to be, lost: something the present account conveys in full measure.
… Silent Songs is central to an understanding of the composer he was to become: an absorbing and ultimately moving experience.
Graham Simpson, International Record Review