Customer Reviews

Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs

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Silvestrov delivers power through the simplicity of piano and an introspectively shaky baritone. The message of the melodies preclude the need for translation--this music touches the heart and exemplifies the adage "music is the universal language". Yet, lugbrious and oftentimes languishing, the tenor of the recording is very melanacholy. But, the listener can somehow relate to the deep emotion of the composer. You can feel as if he speaks from his entire life and experience and expects closure. A few songs glimpse hope found in disaster (see track 9 on the first CD), but a complete attention to the entire recording renders satisfaction.

A fine mix of simplicity, genius, comfort, and haunting soul exposure. A great example of the depth of the Ukrainian spirit, as well as a tribute to their wonderful (and sometimes neglected)contribution to music.

I've noticed that most significant lieder cycles are usually qualified as being "the [fill in the blank] version of Schubert's Winterreise." So Eisler's Hollywood Songbook becomes the American (or German, or Post-serialist, or even Socialist) Winterreise, and so on. In spite of how annoying this trend might be, I really think Silvestrov's Silent Songs deserves the title "The 20th-century Winterreise."

Why? No only is the cycle aching beautiful, but there lurk within it depths of what one might call extra-musical resonance as well. Silent Songs were composed after Silvestrov was expelled from the Soviet Composer's Union in 1974. His public career as a composer was over, and he turned to the ultimate "private" genre - the lied. What had once been the favoured parlour music becomes in Silvestrov's hands a kind of commentary on the nature of privacy itself - enforced privacy, in his case. Thus the emotions which each song here evokes run the range between amused introspection and despair, with lonliness colouring all. There are times when the feeling that these songs are truly "silent" - that we genuinely within someone's mind, listening to their every thought - becomes almost claustrophobic.

The engineers place the baritone's voice every so slightly forward, and what would normally sound like a mistake works to highlight the sense of uncomfortable closeness between the voice and the listener. This is ECM's finest release of Silvestrov's work, and that's saying a whole lot. Could we have the symphonies now, please?

...and that can be a wonderful thing. In the case of this recording, it's one factor that makes it one of the most moving and beautiful I've heard in some time.

One reviewer (I can't recall where I read it, sorry...) said that it felt as if Yokovenko was singing right into the ear of the listener -- and that's a very apt characterization. The notes by the pianist in the booklet recall preparing to perform the songs on the concert stage for the first time, in Moscow, in 1985. He cites the preparation and the performance as one of the happiest moments of his artistic life -- it shows in his performance, as well as in that of baritone Sergey Yokovenko. The opportunity to present a program such as this, with the challenges and rewards that it embodies, is a rare one.

The texts are from a variety of poets -- Pushkin, Baratynsky, Sehvchenko, Mandelstam, Yesenin and other Russians, as well as Western icons Keats and Shelley. Whether Russian or Western in their source, the pieces here are universally beautiful -- the translations are provided in the booklet (as usual with ECM releases, the packaging is first-rate), but this music speaks directly to the soul of the listener. The emotion it carries needs no translation.

As I listen to this recording, I can easily imagine that the music is being performed for me alone -- but I'll be generous and share it with everyone. I can't recommend this CD highly enough -- heartfelt thanks to ECM for making it available. I encourage listeners who are unfamiliar with Silvestrov's work to check out some of the other ECM packages of his music, such as REQUIEM FOR LARISSA; LEGGIERO, PESANTE; and METAMUSIK, POSTLUDIUM.

These intimate songs are achingly beautiful. I am so moved by them, I find it hard to write complete sentences about them, but these words come to me: prophetic, apotheosis, cherished, personal, melancholy, loved, vista . . .

Please, just spend the money and buy these CDs.

Valentin Silvestrov's SILENT SONGS has an immediacy that transports me away from the outter, the clutter and sometimes frenetic vibrations I often get caught up in, living my life in a culture that seems more and more to be herding all of us into an endless busyness and superficiality. Whenever I listen to this c.d., I am led WITHIN myself to a realm of centeredness, peace, and balance that I find myself all too often famished for. I purchased this album from Amazon for a very good price, and couldn't be more pleased with it. I simply cannot imagine that Mr. Silvestrov (Composer), Sergey Yakovenko (Baritone), and Ilya Scheps (Piano) did not know exactly what they were hoping to accomplish with this c.d. which was to extend to the listener a soothing, healing, spititual force that is the essence of the meaning of the word: DARSHAN. I've read people in India would travel great distances to receive the Darshan of Ghandi. Even seeing him passing by in a car at a great distance from them was all they needed to be transported to a place within themselves that meant everything to them. A certain kind of music has that power, too. Can't think of a better example than SILENT SONGS.

Simply amazing - I am so moved by this album that seems to touch my mind and soul....you can't go wrong with this one. Well recorder masterpiece!

My goodness. While I am a fan of classical and modern-classical music, I generally don't care much for lieder. The pieces here, however, are something very different than most combinations of voice and piano. Don't expect the lush textures of Silvestrov's orchestral works, for baritone and piano alone can't offer those thick waves of sound. But Silvestrov's harmonies are overtly Romantic and the Russian and Ukrainian verse he sets, even the later poems, are all poignant and neatly rhymed.

Wary of committing myself right away to the longer cycle, I started my exploration of this disc with the "Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam" (1982). What generally turns me off about lieder is how pretty and stylized it is, often detaching from the actual text of the poem in its attachment to genre conventions. These four settings of Mandelstam's poetry are rough and firmly linked to the expression in the texts. There are strong thematic links between the several songs, which creates a coherent single work in four movements.

"Silent Songs" (1974-77) marks the big shift in Silvestrov's music from his avant-garde explorations to the meditative late works that are meant to be mere "postludes" to the Romantic era. The title refers to the intended performance venue for the music, for Silvestrov shunned the concert halls and Soviet music bureaucracy and presented these at home to an audience of friends. The cycle features 24 poems, mainly Russian classics like Pushkin, Yesenin, Lermontov and Tyutchev. One song is to verse by Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian national poet (this song went on to be quoted in Silvestrov's Requiem to Larissa to devastating effect). There is also a poem each by Keats and Shelly in Russian translation. The music is invariably slow and quiet. The smaller Mandelstam cycle I heard first had occasionally thunderous chords, but "Silent Songs" avoids that kind of drama entirely.

While perhaps more successful in live performance, I do think "Silent Songs" goes on a bit too long on disc, especially if one obeys the composer's stipulation that it be played without any break. Nonetheless, the fact that it holds my interest as long as it does again puts it on a whole other level than most lieder. This recording by baritone Sergey Yakovenko and pianist Ilya Scheps was made during the Soviet era, but it is of surprising quality, with only the slighest tape crackle here or there. With its sense of space and depth, the recording is fit as it is for Manfred Eichner's ECM label.

Committing to two hours plus of slow, Russian-language songs is not the best introduction to Silvestrov. If you don't know his music yet, try his Symphony No. 5 or his piano concerto "Postludium" first. Still, for established fans of the composer, this is a key work in his oeuvre and worth seeking out.