Silvestrov: Piano Sonatas & Cello Sonata

Album review

This recording was originally made in 1992 by Alexei Lubimov, the dedicatee of one of Valentin Silvestrov's three piano sonatas, and was reissued in 2014. It had a second reissue in 2022 as images of Silvestrov fleeing his native Ukraine made headlines. One might hope recording companies will conclude that Silvestrov's music is worthy of deeper exploration. Warner/Erato claims these as world premiere recordings, which they were when they were made, although Jenny Lin, Simon Smith, and others have recorded the piano sonatas since. The 1992-era digital sound is not great, but presumably, Lubimov, a champion of Silvestrov's music, faithfully reflects the composer's intentions. One might say that these three piano sonatas, and Silvestrov's only Cello Sonata (played by Lubimov and Ivan Monighetti), offer examples of the composer's style boiled down to its essentials. Silvestrov, like Pärt and many others, rejected the serialism of his early career, but he did not return to diatonic harmonies. His orchestral music, including nine symphonies, is more eventful, but here one finds intensely meditative, quiet explorations of sonority and texture. There are examples of extended technique (Silvestrov might have been listening to George Crumb), as in a long passage in the middle of the Piano Sonata No. 2 where the piano's strings are plucked, and the conclusion of the Cello Sonata, where a similar treatment of the piano is joined by the cello dissolving into overtones. Each sonata seems to approach the border of silence at its lovely conclusion as if to suggest the Música callada (the "Music That Has Fallen Silent") of Federico Mompou, another possible influence, although Mompou worked on much smaller canvases. At any rate, those who tune into the spirit of this music will find a profound evocation of the interiority created and expressed by composers in the Soviet and then the Russian sphere.

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