Sergey Yakovenko, Ilya Scheps - Silvestrov: Silent Songs (2004)

Following the chamber music album “leggiero, pesante”, the orchestral “Metamusik/Postludium”, and the “Requiem for Larissa”, ECM New Series is pleased to present a most remarkable recording of Valentin Silvestrov’s “Stille Lieder”, a song cycle of great importance in the development and perception of the Ukrainian composer’s work, in a double album that also includes the premiere recording of his “Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam”.“We may feel we have always known these songs,” writes Paul Griffiths in the liner notes to the “Silent Songs”, “and in a sense we have. The first hearing will not seem the first, though we will remember it for that slow shock of familiarity, how it awakens memories… Yet the songs are new – startlingly new for 1974-77, when composers in the Soviet Union were stretching boundaries…Just when composers could at last make big personal statement in public, here was one letting the past express itself, in the private dimensions of whispered song”.