VALENTIN SILVESTROV Bagatellen und Serenaden

Early in the morning in the Himmelsfahrtskirche in Sendling, before the Munich Chamber Orchestra began the first day’s work on the sessions, Silvestrov sat at the piano and began, quietly, to play. A solo piano recording wasn’t planned, but the microphones were set up for the orchestra, which included piano... Producer Manfred Eicher let the machines run anyway, and snared the first of these pieces, finding in these lontano audio snapshots a special poignancy, and encouraging Silvestrov to continue playing after the orchestra session.  There is a quality to the bagatelles almost like eavesdropping on private thoughts: the pieces sound as if created in the moment. But Silvestrov scholar Tatjana Frumkis specifies otherwise: “The bagatelles form a sort of improvised cycle… Yet what we hear is not improvisation in the strict sense: everything has been fully crafted in the composer’s mind down to the nethermost detail… The living flow of the music is sped up or restrained by a prevailing sense of rubato. The dynamics are governed by the softest pianissimos that seem to expand infinitely in the interior of the church. The listener is granted an opportunity to experience one of the composer’s unique autographs, a sound-ideal with his characteristic weightless attack (‘as if on springtime ice’).” The highly unusual recording reveals a great deal about Silvestrov as musical thinker – the bagatelles are like an x-ray of his melodic imagination – and help us understand both the sources from which his larger pieces flow and the kinds of demands he makes of his interpreters. This is not the first time that Silvestrov has recorded his own music, for his debut ECM disc Leggiero, pesante already included, as a postscript, his solo performance of ‘Hymne 2001’. It is, though, the most extensive documentation to date. (ECM Records)