Valentine Silvestrov

Valentine Vassilievitch Silvestrov (in; ), born with Kiev the September 30th 1937. This Ukrainian musician had conquered the music scene with the beginning of the year 1960 as a brain progressist of a group of avant-garde of Kiev joined together around Leonid Grabovski. Free tonality, Dodecaphony, random music, Clusters, recourse to the noises and electronics belonged to its panoply, it tested with the conceptual art and the instrumental Théâtre. Its writing, very expressive, is initially influenced by the post-serialism practitioner then in Western Europe. He was quickly the success, greeted abroad in particular by Adorno like an extraordinarily gifted musician. Its symphony Eschatofonie created sensation with Darmstadt in 1968.

In 1970, after long reflections on the direction of the music, it produces a work-hinge: Drama , I tried here to leave the ghetto of the avant-garde, as of others did it also at the time.

Its music was directed then more and more towards the expressive confidence, with the very stretched melody lines. Without resorting to “polystylistic” it was then a much question in Soviet Union. It is rather about a fusion, of an equal treatment applied to various styles. In 1972, in the Meditation for Violoncello and Chamber orchestra, Silvestrov will expressly recommend the “return to identical”.

Its recent works, Kitsch-Musik , Postludium , Postscriptum , Epitaph or Requiem for Larissa , exploit - even exaltent - the musical resources of last the such Triad and the gestural classico-romantic one, often even with an expression of acknowledged nostalgia. Silvestrov recognizes that these processes lost their original direction and became a kind of “dispossessed” music, ambiguous, that it names “metaphorical”. The means of the past became for him parabolas, crutches of the memory. Its music is the ultimate epilog of the great romanticism.

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