Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs

Following the chamber music album “leggiero, pesante”, the orchestral “Metamusik/Postludium”, and the “Requiem for Larissa”, ECM New Series is very pleased to present a most remarkable recording of Valentin Silvestrov’s “Stille Lieder”, a song cycle of great importance in the development and perception of the Ukrainian composer’s work, in a double album that also includes his “Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam”.

“We may feel we have always known these songs,” writes Paul Griffiths in the liner notes to the “Silent Songs”, “and in a sense we have. The first hearing will not seem the first, though we will remember it for that slow shock of familiarity, how it awakens memories…Yet though we may feel we have always known these songs, we have not. They are new – startlingly new for 1974-77, when composers in the Soviet Union were stretching boundaries…Just when composers could at last make big personal statement in public, here was one letting the past express itself, in the private dimensions of whispered song”.

Though the slowly unfurling, quiet music of these “Stille Lieder” for baritone and piano, inspired by Russian and English poetry was widely considered a departure from Silvestrov’s more overtly “experimental” work, Silvestrov himself remains adamant that the cycle represented neither a change of direction nor a change of heart. The music’s radicalism was merely internalised: “There was more of a transition than a stylistic breech”, he told Tatjana Frumkis. “The avant-garde element has only withdrawn and permeates the entire music like a pinch of salt. The technical and compositional devices work subversively, in a realm of the invisible and inaudible.”

Indeed, these apparently simple songs proved extraordinarily demanding to perform, and it was not until 1985 that the cycle was presented in its entirety, by the great singer Sergey Yakovenko, accompanied by the young pianist Ilya Scheps:

“After looking through the vocal score, I couldn’t get the music out of my head,” Yakovenko recalls. “The work seemed so unique to me that I had to forget all my previous experience and to begin my search for a form of musical interpretation afresh, with something like a tabula rasa.” Ilya Scheps illuminates its specific challenges: “For two hours of very quiet music, the singer and pianist have not only to capture the attention of the audience, but to lend expression to the incredible tension of the music - the electrifying contrasts between the very delicate and inwardly trembling and the eruptively explosive episodes of this invariably quiet work.”

Singer Sergey Yakovenko and pianist Scheps met this challenge with extraordinary resourcefulness, as this original recording of the work reveals. Made in Moscow in 1986 with the participation of Silvestrov and subsequently edited by him, the recording is previously unreleased. There have since been other recorded interpretations of the “Silent Songs” but these premiere recordings remain unsurpassed. The sensitivity of the recording itself reflects the sensitivity of the music.

In this period, Ilya Sheps was just embarking on his life as a performing musician, while Yakovenko, his commitment to contemporary music unique amongst singers in the Soviet Union, had long commanded widespread respect. Yakovenko had collaborated closely with Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and Edison Denison, as well as with Silvestrov. In tribute to his achievement in performances of the “Silent Songs”, Silvestrov subsequently dedicated his “Four Songs After Osip Mandelstam” to the singer, and serves as Yakovenko’s accompanist in the current recording of this work.