Silvestrov: ...flowering over Lethe...

The Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov once described his music as “an echo of what already exists,” and his response to composers of the past is a theme which binds together this often mesmerizing recital by the pianist Alexei Lubimov. A half-elegant, half-haunting waltz by Schubert is the starting-point for the first of Two Dialogues with a Postscript, the second being a rapt meditation on a scrap of melody from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde period. Snippets of a Schubert Impromptu break surface in 19 November 1828…In Memoriam Franz Schubert, Silvestrov’s memorial to the Austrian composer, while an air of melancholy retrospection suffuses the four short movements of 3 February 1857…In Memoriam Mikhail Glinka. Baroque embellishments fleck the Hommage à Henry Purcell, whose concluding movement has a particularly plaintive quality. Lubimov is acutely attuned to Silvestrov’s deep-seeing, empathetic idiom, conjuring mellow tone and exquisitely nuanced inflections from his Kawai piano throughout this heart-easing recital.