Valentin Silvestrov

Valentyn Vasylyovych Sylvestrov (Ukrainian: Валенти́н Васи́льович Сильве́стров; born 30 September 1937 in Kiev, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union) is a Ukrainian composer and pianist of contemporary classical music.

Sylvestrov began private music lessons at age 15. He studied piano at the Kiev Evening Music School from 1955 to 1958, then at the Kiev Conservatory from 1958–1964; composition under Borys Lyatoshynsky, harmony and counterpoint under Levko Revutsky.

Sylvestrov is perhaps best known for his post-modern musical style; some, if not most, of his works could be considered neoclassical and post-modernist. Using traditional tonal and modal techniques, Sylvestrov creates a unique and delicate tapestry of dramatic and emotional textures, qualities which he suggests are otherwise sacrificed in much of contemporary music. "I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists," Sylvestrov has said.[1]

In 1974, under pressure to conform to both official precepts of socialist realism and fashionable modernism, and likewise to apologise for his walkout from a composers' meeting to protest the Soviet Union invasion of Czechoslovakia, Sylvestrov chose to withdraw from the spotlight. In this period he began to reject his previously modernist style. Instead, he composed Quiet Songs (Тихі Пісні (1977)) a cycle intended to be played in private. Later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he also began to compose spiritual and religious works influenced by the style of Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox liturgical music.

Sylvestrov's Symphony No. 5 (1980–1982), considered by some to be his masterpiece, may be viewed as an epilogue or coda inspired by the music of late Romantic composers such as Gustav Mahler. "With our advanced artistic awareness, fewer and fewer texts are possible which, figuratively speaking, begin 'at the beginning'... What this means is not the end of music as art, but the end of music, an end in which it can linger for a long time. It is very much in the area of the coda that immense life is possible.”

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