VALENTIN SILVESTROV (b.1937): Requiem für Larissa for Chorus and Orchestra.

Description: This powerful, emotionally wrenching, profoundly personal work was written in memory of the composer’s wife, Larissa Bondarenko, who died unexpectedly in 1996. So grief-stricken is this dark work of deepest mourning that it is an uncomfortable experience to listen to, and almost feels unseemly, as though intruding on private tragedy. Rather than setting the traditional Latin text in liturgical sequence, Silvestrov fractures it, as though too distraught to follow its traditional vision of mourning, the day of judgment, and hope of resurrection. Since his turning away from avant-gardism to a richly expressive meta-tonal vocabulary, his music has been notable for its emotional potency, and here the idiom that makes the more recent symphonies such memorable experiences finds full voice in the service of the composer’s own cathartic response to grief. The first two movements, Requiem æternam and Tuba mirum, are shattering in their unrelieved expression of unbearable tragedy. Though still limned in the darkest tones of lament, the extended Lacrymosa seems to take a step in the direction of a more universal mourning, and more closely resembles a passage from a traditional liturgical requiem Mass. Immediately thereafter, though, Silvestrov interpolates verses from the poem “The Dream” by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861): “Goodbye, o world, o earth, farewell, unfriendly land, goodbye!” set as a desperately sad folksong-like chant for greatly reduced forces, rendered in the dreamlike fashion of memory. This memory of "a beautiful, vanished world” continues in the following Agnus Dei, which combines a distantly intoned phrase from the liturgy with Mozart pastiche in the strings - the kind of thing that Silvestrov has done throughout his career, from early works like Naive Music and Kitschmusik to the more recent Melodies of Silence - and with a new version of his piano piece The Messenger, which legend has it was the last piece he played to his dying spouse. In the final two sections, fragments of the Requiem bring the work full circle, returning to the inconsolable despair of the opening, dying away in slower and slower phrases. This recording is of a live performance, with the added frisson that that implies, given in 2021 to mark the 85th birthday of the great Ukrainian composer and probably released now to honour him during his forced exile from his native land (as of March) because of the war. German-English libretto. Jutta Neumann (altus), Andreas Hirtreiter (tenor), Priska Eser (soprano), Wolfgang Klose, Michael Mantaj (basses), Bavarian Radio Chorus, Munich Radio Orchestra; Andres Mustonen.