Ukrainian composer
Valentin Silvestrov has been aptly described as an avant-garde romantic. His harmonic language is largely atonal, but he can use it in a grandly Romantic manner, with sweeping unison melodies in the strings, and it can glide freely into post-Romantic harmonic effulgence.
Silvestrov's unabashedly Romantic moments don't sound old-fashioned; it's as though he overlays his Romanticism with the glistening complexity of a thoroughly modern sensibility. The result is a kind of uniquely radiant melancholy, or as one commentator described it, as "the lingering memory of [a lament], the mood of sadness it leaves behind."
Silvestrov's Sixth Symphony embodies this aesthetic of valedictory sadness. It is in five movements, played without pause. The 25-minute middle movement is nearly as long as the other four movements combined, and its Mahlerian aura of grief and intimacy is the symphony's most emotionally poignant and musically limpid expression of the crystalline nostalgia that is characteristic of the composer's aesthetic. Each of the symphony's movements, except for the Larghetto fourth movement, includes a variety of tempo changes. The piece opens in an outburst of overt anguish, and those moments recur occasionally, but the piece moves slowly and reflectively, mostly at a quiet dynamic level. Its mood is predominantly dark, but generally the progression is from darker to lighter, and the passionate musings of the third movement, the delicate filigree of the fourth, and the dignified restraint of the ending of the fifth offer gleams of the possibility of hope. The performance by the
SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by
Andrey Boreyko, is warm, clean, and lovingly nuanced. ECM's recording quality is characteristically stellar, except for some sounds of page turning and chair shuffling that are noticeable in the quieter moments.