Artist: Valentin Silvestrov
Album: Requiem for Larissa
Year: 2004
Line-up: National Choir of Ukraine
”Dumka”
Yevhen Savchuk – choirmaster
National Symphony Orchestra of
Ukraine
Volodymyr Sirenko - director
Label: ECM
”Farewell, O world!
Farewell, O earth
Thou dismal, dreary
land!
I'll hide my torments,
fierce and keen,
Within a cloud-bank
bland.
Then to thyself, my own
Ukraine,
A widow sad and weak,
I shall come flying
from the clouds
And with thee I shall
speak.
From our communion,
soft and low
My heart shall gain
some cheer;
At midnight shall my
soul come down
In dewdrops cool and
clear”
Valentin
Silvestrov is a Ukrainian pianist and composer of modern and
contemporary classical music. Between 1997 and 1999, he composed a
requiem – a mass celebrating the repose of the soul or souls of one
or more deceased persons. What makes this particular requiem bleakly
stand out from more famous requiems composed by the likes of Mozart,
Verdi and Fauré, is the fact that Silvestrov composed his own one
after his wife Larissa Bondarenko died suddenly in 1996.
The
following year Silvestrov began composing this Requiem to her memory,
feeling that it would remain his finale composition. Thus, Requiem
for Larissa is retrospective on the career of Silvestrov as a
composer, reflecting on everything he and his wife had achieved going
back to his First Symphony from 1963 and following his compositional
body of work from the period when his wife was still beside her to
The Messenger for
synthesizer, piano and string
orchestra composed between 1996 and 1997. Luckily in 2003 Silvestrov
returned to large-scale compositions with his Seventh Symphony after
composing only a few minor chamber pieces after he had finished his
Requiem for Larissa.
Listening
to this Requiem is like watching a harsh and snowy winter landscape:
on the surface it might seem bleak, cold, inhospitable and charmless
but it has far more sides to it than one can at first perceive. The
music seems to be still and frozen capturing and petrifying the
memories of the past. Yet as the snow in the winter landscape little
motives and fragments of melodies drift cross are eyes slowly. Those
short fragments of melodies and motives seem to float almost lifeless
in the air but as we try to capture them they move away and disappear
in the air, almost like an echo fading away into silence as it has
almost been nothing but a resonance of a memory already long gone,
the flakes of snow running through our fingers which we try to grasp
in our hands.
The
music of this Requiem is almost as fragile as snow or the human body
which has carried the soul of a person to whom it is composed. The
choir represents the angels of both light and darkness as Silvestrov
succeeds in capturing the wide palette of wide range of feelings one
must go through on the occasion of a death of a loved one: the
sorrow, the sadness, the horror, the despair, the anger, the
emptiness – and finally the acceptance, the calmness, the comfort
of a memory and maybe even hope. Let us have a moment of silence in
this darkest time of the year to remember the beloved souls of those
who are no longer with us here in their physical form.
Written
by Παναγιωτιης
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