Born September 30, 1937 in Kyiv. Sylvestrov is known for orchestral, chamber, vocal, and piano works performed throughout the world. His musical training began at fifteen with private studies, followed by the Stetsenko Evening Music School (1953–55, graduating with a gold medal), then composition at the National Music Academy of Ukraine (1958–64) under Borys Liatoshynsky, with counterpoint and harmony under Levko Revutsky. Among his honours are the Koussevitzky Composition Prize, First Prize at the Internationale Gaudeamus Muziekweek in Amsterdam, and the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.
OrchestralChamberVocalPiano
Awards
Koussevitzky Composition Prize (1967)
First Prize, Internationale Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Amsterdam (1970)
for violin, cello and piano (1971), performed by members of the Talea Ensemble
Performed by Talea Ensemble (Ensemble), Emilie-Anne Gendron (Violin), Chris Gross (Cello), Steven Beck (Piano)
In a 2007 lecture at the Ukrainian Composers’ Union Valentyn Sylvestrov stated that the music in his work Drama (1971) “moves through the noise into real gestures which have a symbolic, Zen-like character.” He also mentioned that before composing this piece he read D. T. Suzuki’s writings, which were “astonishing, fresh and at that time very appropriate,” and that the idea of “freeing oneself from all kinds of ideological schemes” was especially appealing because he was fed up with the Communist ideology. The uncertainty surrounding Sylvestrov’s encounter with Zen Buddhism resembles that of John Cage, whose memory of attending Suzuki’s lectures at Columbia University and the ambiguity of his references to Zen texts pose historical difficulties for scholars. One common goal espoused by both composers is to urge the audience to pay attention to each moment of their works, evident in the 45-minute Drama as much as in Cage’s 4’33”. The combination of styles in this piece is important, given that it is a contemporary of major polystylistic works in both the USSR and Europe, such as Alfred Schnittke’s First Symphony and Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. In a 1978 letter to German musicologist Hannelore Gerlach, Sylvestrov explained that he was: “trying to find a new musical style that would defy any single existing sound system (modal, tonal, atonal or sonoristic)” and that Drama “became the grounds for this unification.” Drama consists of three movements that follow without a break, while performers enact theatrical gestures during transitions between the violin sonata, the cello sonata, and the final trio. One notable moment occurs at the end of the first movement when the violinist moves around the stage, lights a match and immediately blows it out. This silent gesture is symbolic and was inspired by Zen texts. Yet a foreign critic, writing in the Allgemeine Zeitung in 1978 about the performance of Drama in the Estonian capital Tallinn, interpreted this gesture as a “sign that the composer cannot or should not utter what he cares about, or that someone or something is holding him by the throat.”
in memory of Vasyl Slipak; Joanna Mieleszko, soprano; Pavel Gintov, piano
Performed by Joanna Mieleszko (Soprano), Pavel Gintov (Piano)
Three Songs by Valentyn Sylvestrov are also rooted in tragedy. Dedicated to the memory of Ukrainian baritone Vasyl Yaroslavych Slipak (1974–2016), whose death was caused by a sniper’s bullet near Luhansk in the combat zone of Eastern Ukraine, Sylvestrov’s large-scale song setting in many ways resembles his earlier cycles Quiet Songs (Tikhiye pesni, 1973–77), Steps (Stupeni, 1980–82), and Four Songs to Poems by Osip Mandelstam (1982). The three songs we will hear come from the set that opens Sylvestrov’s cycle dedicated to Slipak: settings of Taras Shevchenko’s “A Cherry Orchard by the House”; Lesia Ukraïnka’s “I Stood and Listened to the Spring”; and Pavlo Tychyna’s “The Azure Sky Encircled My Soul.” They also exemplify Sylvestrov’s goals for kitsch: to redeem and elevate the commonplace, finding salvation in the weak and rejected. (Written by Peter Schmelz)
In his manuscript for Kitsch Music (1977), Valentyn Sylvestrov provided instructions for the performer that listeners may find instructive as well: “Play very quietly (pp) and extremely quietly (ppp) as if from a distance. Separate the melody very carefully, play it as close to the accompaniment as possible!! Play very tenderly, with an intimate tone, as if carefully touching with the music the memory of the listener, so that the music sounds inside the consciousness, as if the memory of the listener itself is singing this music. The composer intends the name ‘kitsch’ (weak, rejected, abortive) in an elegiac and not an ironic sense.” As these evocative descriptions suggest, Kitsch Music — perhaps Sylvestrov’s most played composition — is also one of his most misunderstood. The paradoxes and contradictions of this deceptively simple, seductively ambiguous score get at the heart of his kitsch aesthetic, an aesthetic of memory, memorialization, tradition, and revolution. Most significantly, Sylvestrov’s kitsch is not to be understood as a joke — or played, for example, as a Norwegian pianist once did, at a hair salon in an urban mall. A cathedral would be a better venue, for Sylvestrov’s aesthetic, which loosely evokes Brahms, Chopin, or Schumann, cultivates reverberant echoes. The composition is more specifically indebted to Silvestrov’s slightly younger contemporary Myroslav Skoryk (b. 1938): the second movement of Kitsch Music borrows from the fourth movement (“Aria”) of Skoryk’s Fifth Partita for piano, “In Modo Retro” (1975). Most recently, Sylvestrov has also revealed a very specific dedicatee, and a tragic foundation, for the composition. Not only an elegy for past musical practices, Sylvestrov responded to the death of a friend, Pyotr Solovkin, “a very subtle composer who was very close to me,” who committed suicide shortly before Sylvestrov wrote Kitsch Music. Sylvestrov said Solovkin was an “unbelievably intelligent man, who was younger than me by ten years. And I remember feeling strange… That situation didn’t demand any clusters or anything avant-garde. It demanded only something very gentle. Thus Kitsch-Music is for me a tragic composition. It arose from being stunned by this situation… I never said anything about this. It is not a composition in memory of Solovkin. But in a purely biographical sense that happened, and this composition was the result. At the time I simply couldn’t do anything differently.” (Written by Peter Schmelz)
Performed by Ginevra Petrucci (Flute), Talujon (Percussion)
During this period Valentyn Sylvestrov and Volodymyr Zahortsev were among Liatoshynsky’s students at the Kyiv Conservatory. In 1964 Sylvestrov composed Mystère for the famous flautist Severino Gazzelloni and Les Percussions de Strasbourg, and it premiered in 1965 at the Venice Biennale. Called the “masterpiece” of his early period by musicologist Levon Hakobian, it combines twelve-tone methods with aspects of chance composition — what Sylvestrov later described as a “transition from dodecaphony to the avant-garde.” The alto flute muses bewitchingly against the gradual accumulation of percussion created by six players; as the composer put it, “the pathos of the solo flute inspires the ‘chorus’ of the percussion, in a word, a Bacchic celebration.”
Performed by Hans Tashjian (Bass-baritone), Anna Keiserman (Piano)
The cycle Silent Songs is among Valentyn Sylvestrov’s most famous works and representative of the composer’s change in style in the 1970s. Of the cycle, “Farewell, world” is the only song in Ukrainian, setting a text by Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko; the original poem led to Shevchenko’s arrest and exile in the 1840s.
Performed by Vira Slywotzky (Contralto), Margarita Rovenskaya (Piano)
Farewell, after Keats, is one of a large song cycle called Music for Poetry written between 2011 and 2021. According to the composer: “Poetry… is the salvation of the most important thing, namely melody as a holistic and indispensable organism. Either this organism exists or it does not. I believe that music — even if it cannot be ‘sung’ — is nevertheless song; not a philosophy, not a world view, but a song of the world about itself and a musical testimony of being.”
