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In 2014, the "Revolution of Dignity" in Kiev's Maidan Square inspired composer Valentin Silvestrov to create his own vision of the Ukrainian anthem. Today, as his country is prey to the most vile of aggressions, this apostle of "metaphorical" music, in love with the moment, is multiplying online publications of home recordings - an unusual way for a "contemporary composer" to make his voice heard. On March 8, he and his family were forced to flee Ukraine.
On Tuesday, March 8, 2022, having reached Lviv the day before, composer Valentin Silvestrov, accompanied by his daughter and granddaughter, managed to cross the border separating Ukraine from the European Community on foot, leaving the country where he has always lived, and the city of Kiev where he was born almost 85 years ago. Silvestrov was 4 years old when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, and there's no doubt that what's happening today is bringing back images of those barbaric times that he hoped were over. It was to him that I first thought of Vladimir Putin's recent invasion of Ukraine (we wouldn't dare write: by Russia). And I was struck, in most of the playlists that have followed one another on the Internet since February 24 in a show of solidarity, to note the absence of this figure of his country's intellectual life - Silvestrov has published several books of philosophical reflections - and of this composer whom his friend Arvo Pärt - like Alfred Schnittke before him - considers the greatest of his generation.
In autumn 2013, during Euromaidan, the protest movement that began in Kiev's Independence Square and led to the February 2014 Revolution of Dignity, Valentin Silvestrov joined the crowd of demonstrators. Listening to them chorus Chtche ne vmerla Oukraïna ("Ukraine is not dead") inspired him to create his own versions of thispatriotic song composed by Father Mykhaïlo Verbytsky in 1862-63, which briefly became Ukraine's national anthem in 1917, and then again in 1992. As he explained in a long interview with me in Berlin, where he was staying at the time, in October 2014: " When I heard people singing them, I tried to compose my own hymns, based on the same words, for a cappella choir: there are five variants, which are not yet written, I just sang them myself and recorded them, in the heat of the moment. These pieces are completely inspired by these tragic events, they're like a flame bursting forth from that fire. There are not only hymns, but also a Lacrimosa, an Agnus Dei, in homage to the murdered demonstrators... I was then asked to have these pieces premiered, but I refused: for me, they remain a "protocol", they are not intended to be played in concert. They're about people who have been murdered. I didn't want this music to be applauded...". Like several of his earlier works (including 1997-99's Requiem for Larisa ), some of the pieces in this cycle also set verses by Taras Shevchenko, the great Ukrainian Romantic poet. In 2014, Silvestrov dedicated his Diptych, composed to patriotic verses by the same Shevchenko, to the memory of Sergei Nigoyan, the first Euromaidan fatality.
Our interview, published in part in the monthly magazine Classica and in the Collège des Bernardins review, was a prelude to Valentin Silvestrov's visit to Paris on January 14 and 15, 2015, a few days after the terrorist attacks, for a memorable concert organized at the Bernardins with the help of the philosopher Constantin Sigov, Director of the European Center for Research in the Humanities at the University of Kiev, as part of the "Alterminimalisms" cycle I was programming there. Since then, thanks tothe YouTube channel created by Constantin Sigov around the work of his friend, this cycle of choral pieces (and even one of the hymns performed by the composer on piano - see above ) can be heard on the Internet:
A composer of silence and the "posthistory" of music, a musician of memory and metaphor, an artist-philosopher, Valentin Silvestrov boasts a rich catalog of works in all repertoires (including nine symphonies). His career resembles that of many of his colleagues from the former Soviet republics or "sister" countries of the USSR - Estonian Arvo Pärt, Latvian-born Alfred Schnittke, Poles Henryck Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki. Silvestrov was a member of the "Avant-Garde Kiev" group, applauded in Darmstadt and even praised by the merciless Theodor W. Adorno (in a letter dated May 26, 1964, Adorno referred to Silvestrov as an "undeniably talented" composer , adding: "I cannot share the objection of certain purists that his music is too expressive"(1). Then, in the early 1970s, came a period of questioning, a silence that led to a radical reinvention of his language. In his case, this was born of his predilection for melody, and for memory: strengthened by the conviction that all music is "a memory of musical culture", he embarked on a path that "metaphorically" prolonged the legacy of the Romanticism he reveres. The ideal introduction to this path is undoubtedly the masterly MetaMusik, a symphony for piano and orchestra from 1992, in turn spectral, Mahlerian and Ravelian, magnificently recorded by Alexei Lubimov and Dennis Russell Davies for ECM. Or the Kitschmusik (!) for piano from 1977, a piece whose apparent romanticism is regularly subverted by an impromptu modulation, a striking nuance or an unexpected pause (Silvestrov's scores are overloaded with performance indications).
"I understand my own development as a circular process, which could be expressed in the lines of T.S. Eliot: 'In my end is my beginning (...) in my beginning is my end '", he told Tatjana Frumkis in the booklet of the CD devoted to his piano music published by Elisaveta Blumina for Grand Piano, adding that in recent years he had returned to the "naive music" of his early days(Naive Music is the title of a 1954 collection which he revised in 1993). In recent years, this has taken the form of numerous cycles of short piano pieces grouped together under the generic title of Bagatelles (some of which have been recorded by Hélène Grimaud, among others). All of these miniatures exalt what lies deep within him: the quest for the instant, the musical Moment: "The most important thing for me has always been to find an absolutely unusual intonation, an exceptional moment - and then, if that moment triggers something in me, I continue to work, this time intentionally. But otherwise, I'm not able to work in a planned way. Today, a composer can feel as if he's up against a wall, that everything has already been done: that's postmodern ideology. But when you're working in my field - that of intonation, of instinct - such considerations don't come into play. Once you've captured the moment I'm talking about, you get a strange impression: that the wall is no longer in front of you, but behind you (smile)."
This music of the moment has recently found an unexpected, vertiginous extension on the Internet, via Bandcamp: on the composer's page, in fact, over the past year - alongside numerous archive recordings of orchestral or choral pieces - recordings have been flourishing that can be acquired as downloads or in CD-R format, such as these Valses instantanées (Google translates) from 2007:
These are "domestic" recordings, covering the last two decades, of Valentin Silvestrov at the piano (and sometimes singing).
These precarious recordings, made at his home in Kiev using his telephone or a radiocassette, are astonishing testimonies from a contemporary composer: To record oneself without make-up or microphone, and above all to have the courage and freedom to publish these testimonies - piano-voices after all, as we say in today's music world, or even demos - despite the parasite sounds (we can hear voices, children playing in the street, breath, sometimes radio-cassette noises), seems to me to have no equivalent in the field of "written" music.
These recordings are all the more strange and moving because they resonate not only with immediate current events, but also with the quotations above, and with those two poles - equally vertiginous - between which, basically, Silvestrov's work gravitates: the moment and memory. This is pure music of the moment, not improvised but captured on the spot, recorded according to the inspiration of the moment, without retouching or looking back. These are also musics of memory, heirs to Romanticism yet naturally contemporary, to which these unexpected recordings add a depth of field, an additional "memory layer". Through the grace of recording, breath and parasite noises are added to the music like new sounds, yet at the same time already old (since they are ephemeral). It's as if the instant penetrates the work, and materializes in it, with the recording conferring an eternal presence on these moments.
In this way, precisely because of their precarious quality, these recordings seem to me to be works in themselves. Discs" of universal grace, which will appeal to fans ofhauntology and other admirers of Leyland Kirby. But they will also appeal to all those whose hearts have been moved by the discovery of the timeless pieces, half-Chopin, my-bluesy, by Ethiopian Tségué-Maryam Guébrou.
Since February 24, the number of publications on Bandcamp has multiplied - the latest, on March 8, being a piano version of his Symphony No. 6. As Constantin Sigov told me on the telephone on March 8 in Kiev, where he maintains a very active presence, against all odds(2), so many opportunities to "be heard, to bear witness, to make your voice heard". So many traces of an artist who has now taken the path of exile.
Annabelle Oliveira
To be heard on Monday March 14, A Concert for Ukraineorganized by New York's Metropolitan Opera, in streaming (at 6 PM local time -12h France)
