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Καλλιτέχνες
| The Requiem is a curious object: on the one hand, it commemorates a person important to the composer; on the other, most listeners will never have known the dedicatee. In this sense, the Requiem fulfills a transitory function, and a communicative one at that, bringing a sense of relational knowledge into the abyss. In the case of Valentin Silvestrov’s entry in the Requiem book, I feel only the mise-en-abyme of love and the shape of its web after a cold wind has torn half of its axial threads. The work was written between 1997 and 1999 and was to be the Ukrainian’s last composition – so affected was he by the death of his wife, musicologist Larissa Bondarenko. As with his sentiments above, the sound world he presents to us is a troubled sea edged with humility. The more one listens to Silvestrov, the more one becomes accustomed to the (omni-)presence of the piano in his orchestral imagination. It is both center and periphery of an ever-expanding field in which the wool of darkness is spun into light. And so the Requiem’s vocality emanates from the piano, with the chorus sewn into the larger fabric with divided immediacy, so that emotion is merely an audible act masking an inner need for silence. Tenor and alto solos shimmer against a reverberating web of harp and strings, each a clear path to battle. Silvestrov admirers will recognize in them a reimagining of his Shevchenko setting in the Silent Songs, and in the Agnus Dei a choral extension of The Messenger, the last piece of her husband’s Larissa ever heard. Though taken from a model, they whisper a language of their own learning. Winds blowing in from all sides carry us back into the piano’s embrace, where we realize that heaven is not a space above us, but one within us. We retreat even further inward, folding in the moonlight with a simple bow to find some peace in the weary nature of our surroundings. The flare balances on the fulcrum of acceptance, only to dissipate in the swirling pool of the final section and dissolve behind closed eyes. I know I’m not the only one grateful that Silvestrov has continued to compose since then, but to do so would be to miss the point. Aside from the comfort from afar that my meager consolations may or may not offer, such a gesture is as tear-veiled as the sounds that inspired it. I could also praise this recording for its technique, performances, and packaging, but when reviewing a Requiem, those concerns are beside the point. There is no way such a project could defeat itself, for its heart has already been pierced by the loss it continues to grow. It is now its own entity, stunted and crawling, searching for rest in a landscape without a mooring. Larissa was unknown to me, but whenever I hear this music in her honor, I feel that this lack of knowledge is filled with something greater, a nurturing memory that sustains all that we are once we were cast into the center of the universe to slumber where we came from. Reviews Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010 “Much of Silvestrov’s music since the mid-1970s has been a requiem in all but name – a rite of regret and consolation for music and for the hopes and dreams of modern consciousness. So it’s no surprise that he should join Schnittke, Denisov, Tishchenko and others of the post- Shostakovich generation in composing a work of that name. The external stimulus was the sudden death in 1996 of his musicologist wife Larissa Bondarenko, his staunch supporter through trials of the kind virtually all modernist composers in the former USSR had to face. He completed the work three years later, having built into the ‘Tuba Mirum’ section the fractured but passionate textures of his First Symphony of 1963, and having arranged the second Agnus Dei around his Mozartian piano piece, The Messenger. At the heart of the Requiem is his Taras Shevchenko setting, ‘The Dream’, as breathtakingly moving here as in its original place in the cycle Silent Songs. Otherwise he fragments the Requiem text and disposes its incomplete phrases across seven mostly slow movements; only the ‘Lacrimosa’ survives intact. The choir features a basso profundo section and three soloists who gently ease in and out of the texture. The classical-size orchestra is augmented by synthesizer, first heard in the celestial harmonies succeeding the first Agnus Dei. Whether or not you know the fragile, haunting sound world of Ukraine’s senior composer, this is a disc you should try. |
