After the Grammy-nominated chamber music album ‘leggiero, pesante’, a recording of major compositions for piano and orchestra by the man Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt have both called “one of the greatest composers of our time.” He is certainly one of the most original: Valentin Silvestrov’s uniquely poetic and dreamlike music is played here with uncanny sensitivity and luminosity by Alexei Lubimov, with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies.
Valentin Silvestrov: Metamusik / Postludium
Alexei Lubimov, Radio Symphonieorchester Wien, Dennis Russell Davies
- 1Metamusik - Symphony for piano and orchestra (1992)
47:45 - 2Postludium - Symphonic poem for piano and orchestra (1984)
19:53
In an interview with the New Yorker, Arvo Pärt recently described Valentin Silvestrov as “one of the greatest composers of our time”. These premiere recordings of “Metamusik” and “Postludium” made with Valentin Silvestrov’s participation, underline Pärt’s conviction, and emphasize the uniqueness of the Ukrainian composer’s vision. They also serve to round out a portrait of the composer first sketched with 2001’s Grammy-nominated chamber music album “leggiero, pesante”; the focus here is on “symphonic music”, yet the term seems inadequate for Silvestrov’s delicately -realized compositions - played with extraordinary restraint and fluidity by Alexei Lubimov with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies.
Lubimov: “Valentin Silvestrov has created a cosmos unlike any other, with its own themes, characters and, above all, a very personal manner of thought, utterance and writing. A cosmos that has remained a unified whole, despite a marked stylistic shift - from avant-garde to the so-called “metaphorical style” – since the beginning of the Seventies. All of his works are like links in a chain that I can recognise, literally, with my fingers. Precisely notated improvisation inspired by illumination in a wakeful state or a dream: that is how I would describe the source of his artistic style. Silvestrov has truly mastered the art of so notating his visions that the interpreter can understand and translate them. But as simple and transparent as it seems (there is ‘little’ in the lines, but so very much between them), his music is a great challenge. It is the tiny details that demand such meticulous work from the interpreter. And recognising a free flow of music behind so much method is exceedingly difficult. … While recording the coda of ‘Metamusik’, I realised I was neither counting the values of notes and rests nor attempting to adhere to the articulation marks. I was playing absolutely intuitively, as if I could see the sounds and harmonies before me. The works on this CD can be understood as existential metaphors, parables about the inner life of music that opens a window on other worlds and eras. Outwardly, both ‘Postludium’ and ‘Metamusik’ are scored as piano concertos. But they have little to do with the genre, bearing more of a family resemblance to Scriabin’s ‘Prometheus’ or Stravinsky’s ‘Movements’. Piano and orchestra do not compete, they complement each other and more: the orchestra often sounds like an expansion of the sonorities of the piano voice.“
In the CD booklet, Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich observes that “both ‘Postludium’ and ‘Metamusik’ are symphonic works with a solo part tailored specifically to the subtle magic of the pianist Alexei Lubimov. Though the piano writing is monophonic throughout, there is no singing line, but swirling cascading textures. This enables the piano to articulate itself as an individual, subjective voice, but also as the medium of a sort of alienation, as if someone were speaking, not directly, but in an aside and as if in a dream. Perhaps the unique quality of the diction derives from the communicating subject being shown at the eternal moment of self-renunciation. More than ever, the orchestral sonorities are neither counterpart nor partner in dialogue, but complement, enveloping and enfolding the pianistic monologue, giving spatial dimension to the soliloquy.”
“Metamusik” was commissioned from Valentin Silvestrov for the 14th Berlin Biennale of Music in 1993. It is dedicated to Alexei Lubimov and represents an important programmatic milestone along the composer’s artistic path. “Postludium”, written almost a decade earlier and dedicated to its first interpreter Virko Baley, can be considered a prototype for “Metamusik” in terms of its scoring, although it is, as Tatjana Frumkis has noted, “different in scale and structural approach, more in the mould of the Romantic concertos of Liszt, Schumann or Tchaikovsky.”
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