The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

Composed in 1992 for the following year’s Berlin Biennale, Metamusik is one of the most ambitious of Silvestrov’s ‘postlude’ pieces – music that as it were looks back on Music, with infinite tenderness and regret, as though it belonged to some wonderful but lost civilisation. True to form, the piece begins with an explosion of jagged shards of sound and proceeds as if in slow contemplation of their slowly receding echoes. As ever, Silvestrov’s effortless crossing of stylistic boundaries is breathtaking, as is his ability to defamiliarise apparent cliches and thereby to evoke the equivalent of out-of-body experiences.

Admittedly, at nearly 48 minutes the single movement of Metamusik is dangerously protracted, and I’m not yet sure that it sustains interest as magnificent as the comparably extended Fifth Symphony (still to my mind Silvestrov’s most profound score). The alternately fragmented and dreamy concertante piano writing – fundamental though it is to the character of the piece, and wonderfully subtle though Lubimov’s delivery of it is – does less than it might to provide trajectory and focus.

In these senses Postludium, composed in 1984 and familiar from at least three CDs (all nla), is the more approachable piece. Its last pages always stop me in my tracks, such is their heart-stopping beauty. They are rather like music to accompany the film of a peaceful death, yet charmed from the fabric of the preceding 15 minutes of music with astonishing refinement of ear and sensibility. Conductor and orchestra are as alive to these qualities as Lyubimov himself.

Silvestrov’s chamber works are intriguing microcosms of essentially the same expressive world. The Cello Sonata of 1983 and the First Quartet of 1974 are actually rather more than that. Each lasts more than 20 minutes, and like Postludium their single movements become more hypnotic as they proceed, eventually fading into wisps of unpitched sound. Deathbed clairvoyance is again the image that comes to mind with the three shorter Postludes, the first of which features wordless vocalises for soprano, while the second is for solo violin and the third for cello and piano. All the artists on this disc have worked with the composer, and they identify totally with his fragile musical poetry. Silvestrov himself shows the kind of shadowy, evanescent sound he has in mind with his Hymn 2001.

ECM’s recordings are generously bathed in ambience, to the point where some listeners may feel discomfited. For myself, I salute the care that has gone into these projects, and I welcome the chance to get to know music that I’m sure will come to be regarded as having far more than merely niche interest.

(https://www.gramophone.co.uk)