Valentin Silvestrov Essentials

Despite being perhaps the most revered voice in Ukrainian classical music, Valentin Silvestrov spent much of his career being unperformed in his home country due to Soviet restrictions against music deemed transgressive. His mature music of the 1970s and afterward, though, is not dissonant and acerbic; the composer built his reputation on a spartan and mystic brand of postmodernism. He has referred to his meditations on common-practice music as “kitsch” (see Kitsch-Muzik for an early statement of purpose), and many of his works are straightforwardly neoclassical (Hommage à J.S. B., Fugitive Visions of Mozart). However, he always elevates his source material, using it as a basis for sprawling musical elegies (Postludium) and evocations of religious ecstasy (Liturgical Chants, Hymne 2001).