Ep. 71. Valentyn Silvestrov Kitsch Music (complete) Anna Shelest, piano

Valentyn Silvestrov (b. 1937)
Kitsch Music (1977)
0:00 I. Allegro vivace (bright and translucent, free, trembling but tranquil)
3:02 II. Moderato (bright and translucent, flowing)
6:58 III. Allegretto (free, very soft and translucent, distant (extremely soft))
10:16 IV. Moderato (free, bright and translucent, introspective)
13:23 V. Allegretto (soft, bright and translucent with circumspection)
Anna Shelest, piano

Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt have both called the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov "one of the greatest composers of our time”. He is also one of its true originals; though a leading figure in the former Soviet Union’s avant-garde in the 1960s, he subsequently came to realise that "the most important lesson of the avant-garde was to be free of all preconceived ideas – particularly those of the avant-garde."
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The following program notes are by Peter Schmelz from Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, New York City, 2020
In his manuscript for KITSCH MUSIC (1977) , VALENTYN SYLVESTROV provided instructions for the performer. Listeners may find them instructive as well:
Play very quietly (pp) and extremely quietly (ppp) as if from a
distance. Separate the melody very carefully, play it as close to
the accompaniment as possible!!
Play very tenderly, with an intimate tone, as if carefully touching
with the music the memory of the listener, so that the music
sounds inside the consciousness, as if the memory of the
listener itself is singing this music.
The composer intends the name 'kitsch' (weak, rejected. abortive) in an elegiac and not an ironic sense". As these evocative descriptions suggest, Kitsch Music, perhaps Sylvestrov's most played composition, is also one of his most misunderstood. The paradoxes and contradictions of this deceptively simple, seductively ambiguous score get at the heart of his kitsch aesthetic, an aesthetic of memory, memorialization, tradition, and revolution. Most significantly, Sylvestrov's kitsch is not to be understood as a joke or played, for example, as a Norwegian pianist once did, at a hair salon in an urban mall. A cathedral would be a better venue. For Silvestrov's aesthetic, which loosely evokes Brahms, Chopin, or Schumann, cultivates reverberant echoes. The composition is more specifically indebted to Silvestrov's slightly younger contemporary Myroslav Skoryk (b. 1938); the second movement of Kitsch Music borrows from the fourth movement ("Aria") of Skoryk's Fifth Partita for piano, In Modo Retro" (1975). Most recently, Sylvestrov has also revealed a very specific dedicatee, and a tragic foundation, for the composition. Not only an elegy for past musical practices, Sylvestrov responded to the death of a friend, Pyotr Solovkin, a very subtle composer who was very close to me.' and who committed suicide shortly before Sylvestrov wrote Kitsch Music. Sylvestrov said: Solovkin was an "unbelievably intelligent man, who was younger than me by ten years. And I remember feeling strange ... That situation didn't demand any clusters or anything avant-garde. It demanded only something very gentle. Thus kitsch-Music is for me a tragic composition. I arose from being stunned by this situation.……I never said anything about
this. It is not a composition in memory of Solovkin. But in a purely biographical sense that happened, and this composition was the result. At the time I simply couldn’t do anything differently.*

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