soviet music @ lewes u3a decline and fall: music from the

Soviet Music @ Lewes U3A Decline and fall: music from the final years of the USSR

© 2021 Terry Metheringham [email protected] +44 7528 835 422

Silvestrov Fifth Symphony

Valentin Vasiliovich Silvestrov was born in 1937 in Kiev. After graduating as an engineer, he switched to music, studying at Kiev Conservatoire from 1958. Student of Lyatoshinsky for composition and Revutsky for counterpoint. Silvestrov’s early music was typical of the European avant-garde. From the mid-1970s he adopted a radically different style which is lyrical and accessible. Fifth Symphony, completed in 1982, is a hypnotic work which – through officially released recordings – acquired cult status in the final years of the USSR.

Soviet Music: Decline and fall Silvestrov Fifth Symphony


Early Music The major influences in Silvestrov’s early works were:

Webern, Skryabin, and the New Polish School (Penderecki, Lutosławski, Górecki...) Silvestrov’s early interest in avant-garde music was not approved by the authorities. Silvestrov’s graduation piece – Symphony No 1 – submitted in 1963, explored atonality, dodecaphony and polytonality. All these compositional techniques were frowned upon in the USSR. The examiners rejected the symphony. Silvestrov was attacked by the Ukraine branch of the Composers’ Union for “abstractionist and formalist deviations”. Silvestrov’s defence of the avant-garde in an interview, published in the journal Юность / Youth in 1967, precipitated a scornful public dressing down from Khrennikov, head of the Composers’ Union. By 1970 Silvestrov was suspended from the Composers’ Union…

so he had to make a living as a high school teacher for several years.



New Style In the mid 1970s Silvestrov’s music changed radically.

His music started reflecting earlier composers, in harmonic and melodic material, and also in terms of structure and process. Astonishingly, this new style sounded lyrical and was accessible.

Silvestrov refers to his new music as “metamusic” or “metaphorical music”;

a combination of “weak style” – the tonal and nostalgic element, and “strong style” the dissonant energetic contemporary element. [Hakobian Music of the Soviet Era 2017]

Silvestrov has compared the mission of a contemporary composer to Orpheus.

He aspires to reconcile contradictions through reunification of the natural and the cultural, the human and the universal. [Hakobian]

Silvestrov is clearly aware of the potential aesthetic pitfalls of mining the past for contemporary music.

One of his earliest piano compositions in the new style was called: Kitsch Musik (1977) built on allusions to Schumann, Brahms and Chopin.

The performer is advised that this piece is:

“to be played very softly, as if from afar … as if barely touching the listener’s memory, so that the music plays itself inside the conscience of the listener”

[Tatjana Frumkis – liner notes]



Postludes During the 1980s several of Silvestrov’s works included the word “Postlude” in their title. Also, a 1990 a violin sonata was entitled “Post scriptum”. Fifth Symphony – which will be discussed in detail below – has been described by Silvestrov as “Post-Symphony”

*though this appears to be an afterthought… the term post-symphony does not appear on the archived manuscript or the published score].

Here are Silvestrov’s comments on his “Postlude” period:

Thanks to the avant garde we have reached the borders of the sound world. We have become aware of them. … Every text written by a composer inevitably inscribes itself into the world that ‘speaks’ all the time. Therefore I suppose that now, with our highly developed artistic awareness, it is almost impossible to begin a text ‘from the beginning’, so to speak. Any ‘postlude’ is conceived as the act of gathering the resonances, as it were or else as the form that supposes the existence of some other text, which, without being actually included into the given text, is in some way related to it.

[Savenko Silvestrov’s lyrical universe from Underground Music from the Former USSR 1997]



Fifth Symphony Written 1980-2. Premiered 1 May 1985 in Kiev

Symphony Orchestra of the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire, Kiev, conducted Roman Kofman Moscow premiere October 1989 at Festival Alternitiva Recordings issued:

1988 Kiev Symphony Orchestra conducted Kofman 1989 Estonian State Symphony Orchestra conducted Volmer

The symphony is in one movement, and performance takes about 45 minutes. Any moment sampled at random sounds like a late-romantic symphony, played on a Mahlerian orchestra, occasionally creating sounds reminiscent of the 1960s avant-garde. Sustained listening is compelling and perplexing. The music often sounds familiar... half remembered. There are symphonic gestures…

but rather than propelling the music through a narrative journey there is a sense of stasis. The components of the symphony don’t engage, so much as drift.



Fifth Symphony: form There’s an interesting lack of agreement on how to explain the form of this symphony. Svetlana Savenko says

“one can easily discern in this symphony the contours of sonata form”. Peter Schmelz

rejects this work as an example of sonata form. The idea is based on a single factor of one significant theme being reprised just before the end of the work. Schmelz favours an arch form:

Introduction Eight scenes Coda

[Schmelz Valentin Silvestrov and the Echoes of Music History from Journal of Musicology vol 31 no 2 Spring 2014]

Others note that the score is written in seven sections, the tempo markings of which are:

Maestoso Moderato Animato Andante Andantino Moderato Andante



Fifth Symphony: mechanics There is also an interesting range of explanations for how this trancelike score works. Paul Griffiths (quoted by Schmelz)

“Seems to begin where a slow movement by Bruckner, Tchaikovsky or Mahler might have ended, and then goes on ending.”

Savenko

“Braking predominates over becoming.” But this appears to be contradicted by Frumkis (quoted by Schmelz)

“The musical fabric, despite seeming static, is full of internal movement.” Schmelz

“Starts with a cluster and that in turn gives birth to an entire world…” David Fanning notes a process of gradual release, with regular renewal points

“intensifying the tone of ecstatic beauty every five minutes or so, often at the moment when one might begin to fear that [Silvestrov] had lost the plot”

[David Fanning – liner notes BIS recording 2009]



Fifth Symphony: considered as a 3D object Silvestrov has given several interesting explanations of Fifth Symphony, some of which have characteristics of 3D objects:

Icon for the ears Symphony of symbols Sanctuary Musical church

I found a fascinating 2013 thesis by Sam Wilson…

Aesthetics of Past-Present Relations in the Experience of Late 20th- and Early 21stCentury Art Music Wilson suggests we consider Silvestrov’s Fifth Symphony as a ruined monument

“Silvestrov’s work is a ruin, or rather it elicits aesthetic experiences in processes analogous to those elicited by ruins”… “Ruination is a process that may… lead to new and significant aesthetic possibilities, new relationships to the material that stands as ruin.”



Fifth Symphony: evolving reception Whatever the compositional impetus for Fifth Symphony, it vividly demonstrates how audience meaning evolves…

It was written 1980-2 during the Brezhnev stagnation … but first heard in 1985 as Gorbachev took power and change began.

The 1988 Melodiya recording liner notes were by Yelena Zinkevich:

“Grandiose symphonic elegy” “In the space-time of the symphony the universe itself literally appears” “*Response to+ this beautiful world which is threatened by the danger of destruction.”

*Remember … this is the era of Chernobyl and the new arms race] By October 1989, when the symphony was premiered in Moscow, the USSR was wobbling and the central European satellites were breaking out of orbit. Writing in 1997 – after the collapse of the USSR – Savenko notes:

“Reflection of a serene farewell underlies the music of this post-symphony”. Silvestrov proposed in 2010:

“In its conception *Fifth Symphony+ is a symphony of the end of the century.” Schmelz in 2014 attempts to universalise the meaning:

“Silvestrov’s “post” aesthetics convey a sense of melancholy that presses beyond any specific political or social cause. It lies rooted in the mortality of man…”



LINK

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bakdjECOo9A Valentin Silvestrov "Symphony No.5" Kiev Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra conducted Roman Kofman This recording from 1988 has been described as a cult hit in Perestroika-era USSR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bakdjECOo9A

soviet music @ lewes u3a decline and fall: music from the

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