The star of
Valentin Silvestrov was on the rise even before the 85-year-old composer fled his native Ukraine after the Russian invasion and settled in Berlin, and this release by baritone
Konstantin Krimmel and pianist
Helene Grimaud shot onto classical best-seller charts in early 2023. The impetus for the project came from
Grimaud, who has championed
Silvestrov's work. Indeed, she might have wanted to record these songs, for one of their attractive features is the way the piano and the voice interact on equal terms in simple textures, with the piano often doubling the vocal line. The
Silent Songs were some of the first pieces
Silvestrov wrote after abandoning modernist idioms in the 1970s, but they do not represent some kind of retreat into Soviet orthodoxy. They are simple but not minimalist, and they are uncanny. "We may feel we have always known these songs,"
Paul Griffiths wrote in the notes for an earlier recording of the
Silent Songs, "and in a sense we have. The first hearing will not seem the first." The melodic material has the feel of late
Beethoven in its almost naive simplicity that seems to contain depths.
Krimmel does very well in not oversinging these pieces, and his rapport with
Grimaud is obvious. The texts are in Ukrainian and Russian, but "The Isle" is a translation of a poem by
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and this makes a good place to start sampling (or else the translation of
Keats' "La belle dame sans merci"). Yet, one can hear these songs without focusing too closely on the texts; they have a mysterious alchemy of voice and piano. This is a beautiful recording that will reveal much on multiple hearings. ~ James Manheim