Ave Maria
Composer: Valentyn Silvestrov (*1937),
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Profile
Valentin Silvestrov was born on 30 September 1937 in Kiev. He came to music
relatively late, at the age of fifteen, and was initially selftaught. From
1955 to 1958 he took courses at an evening music school while training to
become a civil engineer: from 1958 to 1964 he studied composition and
counterpoint, respectively, with Boris Lyatoshinsky and Lev Revutsky at Kiev
Conservatory. He then taught at a music studio for several years. He has
been a freelance composer in Kiev since 1970.
Silvestrov is considered one of the leading representatives of the „Kiev
avant-garde," which came to public attention around 1960 and was violently
criticized by the proponents of the conservative Soviet musical aesthetic.
In the 1960s and 1970s his music was hardly played in his native city;
premieres, if given at all, were heard only in Russia, primarily in
Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), or in the West. His
Spectrums for chamber orchestra, for example, was premiered to spectacular
acclaim by the Leningrad Philharmonic under the baton of Igor Blashkov in
1965. In 1968 the same conductor gave the premiere of the Second Symphony.
The works of the young composer were awarded the Koussevitzky Prize in 1967,
and the Hymn for Six Orchestral Groups earned Silvestrov the festival's
honorary title of 1970.
Despite these successful performances in the West (the composer himself was
not allowed to attend them!), Silvestrov's music met with no response in his
own country and tended to remain "sub rosa." The avant-gardist tag created
obstacles at every turn. For a long time his works were at least heard on
the periphery of the official music scene, thanks to the enthusiasm of some
performers.
This situation gradually changed with Silvestrov's growing international
acclaim. One of his earliest champions was the American pianist and
conductor Virko Baley, an aficionado and longtime advocate of contemporary
Ukrainian music in general and Silvestrov's works in particular. It was
Baley who brought about the Las Vegas performances of Postludium for piano
and orchestra (1985) and the symphony Exegi monumentum (1988) as well as a
Valentin Silvestrov 50th Birthday Concert in New York (1988). Silvestrov
became a visiting composer at the Almeida Music Festival in London (1989),
Gidon Kremer's Lockenhaus Festival in Austria (1990), and various festivals
in Denmark, Finland, and Holland.
Since the end of the 1980s, the number of performances has increased, even
in Russia and the Ukraine. Silvestrov's music was heard at the „Alternative"
New Music Festival in Moscow (1989), „Five Evenings with the Music of
Valentin Silvestrov" (Ekaterinburg, 1992), “Sofia Gubaidulina and Her
Friends" (St. Petersburg, 1994), „Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Part, Valentin
Silvestrov" (Moscow, 1995), and the Silvestrov 60th Birthday Festival (Kiev,
1998). At the latter event, a scholarly conference devoted to Silvestrov was
held at the Tchaikovsky National Academy of Music of the Ukraine (formerly
Kiev Conservatory).
During the 1990s, Silvestrov's music was heard throughout Europe as well as
in Japan and the United States. In 1998-9, he was a visiting fellow of the
German Academic Exchange Service in Berlin, where three of his works have
been premiered to date: Metamusic (March 1993), Dedication for violin and
orchestra (November 1993), and the Sixth Symphony (August 2002).
Both in his earlier avant-garde period and after his stylistic volte-face of
1970, Silvestrov has preserved his independence of outlook. In recent
decades he has dispensed with the conventional compositional devices of the
avant-garde and discovered a style comparable to western "post-modernism."
The name he has given to this style is „metamusic," a shortened form of
"metaphorical music."
Of all the many translations of the Greek combinative particle meta (post-,
supra-, ultra-, extra-, etc.) Silvestrov prefers "supra" or "ultra." He
regards metamusic as "a semantic overtone on music." In a certain sense, "metamusic"
is also a synonym for a universal style (a concept
that Silvestrov has been using for some time) and a universal language. He
understands it to mean "a general 'lexicon'that belongs to no one but can be
used by anyone in his or her own way." His work has affinities with the age
of the "classical" fin-de-siecle, especially Gustav Mahler, with whom
Silvestrov is often compared. The difference is that the lexicon of today is
unlimited. This limitlessness forces composers to search for the lost
ontological meaning of music as art. In Silvestrov's view - a view that
reveals the lyric basis of his art regardless of the period in his career -
one of the crucial prerequisites for the continued existence of music
resides in melody, which he also regards in an expanded sense of the term.
This has found expression in the remarkable role that vocal music has played
in his musical output. Silvestrov is the author of two large and many
shorter song cycles in addition to isolated songs and cantatas, usually on
poems by classical authors. In his relation to poetry, he avoids trying to
disturb the music inherent in the poems themselves and attempts to
subordinate himself to it. "Poetry ... is the salvaging of all that is most
essential, namely, melody as a holistic and inalienable organism. Either
this organism is there, or it is not. For it seems to me that music is song
in spite of everything, even when it is unable to sing in a literal sense.
Not a philosophy, not a system of beliefs, but the song of the world about
itself, and at the same time a musical testament to existence." This same
approach also governs Silvestrov's instrumental music, which is always
richly infused with both logical and melodic tension
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentyn_Sylvestrov |
Valentyn Vasylyovych Sylvestrov (Ukrainian:
Валенти́н Васи́льович Сильве́стров;[1][2] born 30 September 1937 in Kiev, in
the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union) is a Ukrainian pianist and composer
of contemporary classical music.
EducationSylvestrov began private music lessons at age 15. He studied piano
at the Kiev Evening Music School from 1955 to 1958, then at the Kiev
Conservatory from 1958–1964; composition under Borys Lyatoshynsky, harmony
and counterpoint under Levko Revutsky.
[edit] StyleSylvestrov is perhaps best known for his post-modern musical
style; some, if not most, of his works could be considered neoclassical and
post-modernist. Using traditional tonal and modal techniques, Sylvestrov
creates a unique and delicate tapestry of dramatic and emotional textures,
qualities which he suggests are otherwise sacrificed in much of contemporary
music. "I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of
what already exists," Sylvestrov has said.[1]
In 1974, under pressure to conform to both official precepts of socialist
realism and fashionable modernism, Sylvestrov chose to withdraw from the
spotlight. In this period he began to reject his previously modernist style.
Instead, he composed Quiet Songs (Тихі Пісні (1977)) a cycle intended to be
played in private.
Sylvestrov's Symphony No. 5 (1980–1982), considered by some[who?] to be his
masterpiece, may be viewed as an epilogue or coda inspired by the music of
late Romantic composers such as Gustav Mahler. "With our advanced artistic
awareness, fewer and fewer texts are possible which, figuratively speaking,
begin 'at the beginning'... What this means is not the end of music as art,
but the end of music, an end in which it can linger for a long time. It is
very much in the area of the coda that immense life is possible.”[this quote
needs a citation]
Sylvestrov's recent cycle for violin and piano, Melodies of Instances (Мелодії
Миттєвостей), a set of seven works comprising 22 movements to be played in
sequence (and lasting about 70 minutes), is intimate and elusive - the
composer describes it as "melodies [...]on the boundary between their
appearance and disappearance".[3]
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