Today I would like to recommend the Ukrainian contemporary composer Silvestrov, if I haven't already done so.
My wife sent me an e-mail this morning saying I should listen to him. But I had already heard of him before. We often e-mail each other because we sit in different study rooms in front of the computer with our own studio monitors.
In the 1960s, in his mid-twenties, Silvestrov was part of the Kiev avant-garde, had advocates in the West such as Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna and Theodor W. Adorno, while his music was far too complicated, too modern, too Western for the Soviet cultural officials in his home country. Then, in the 1970s, came the turnaround, a backlash in the direction of the composed past: melodious, tonal, nostalgic. He himself calls it metamusic. Or: unaccentuated classical music.
Silvestrov's pieces are antimonuments, he composes like a Romantic thrown into the present - as New York organisers already found in the 1980s when they announced him as a contemporary Schubert on a concert poster for one of his concerts in Carnegie Hall. Silvestrov, this master of silence, who has just been honoured with the Opus Klassik for his life's work, still likes this fitting comparison today.
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