Kitsch-Musik

I’ve just been listening to Kitsch-Musik, a cycle of five solo-piano pieces by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. These are poignant neo-romantic vignettes in the manner of Chopin or Schumann, but played almost as softly as humanly possible, so that their sound reaches the listener as though from ‘somewhere long ago, and far away’.

…but it is not an imitation or stylisation: it is a question of the listener remembering the archetypes - a deep involvement in the past as a source of the inner life of the human soul. As the composer says, the title ‘Kitsch’ (in the sense of ‘feeble’, ‘failed’, ‘rejected’) has an elegaic rather than an ironic meaning. ‘Play very quietly and extremely quietly, as if from far away, with a tender, intimate sound, as if the music were touching the memory of the listener, …as though the memory itself were singing the music’ - Alexei Lubimov.

This kind of distantly ghostlike quality is a feature of other of Silvestrov’s works too, such as his Silent Songs, and the piano-piece Der Böte (‘The Messenger’), which likewise floats along in an ectoplasm of desolate nostalgia and unembarrassed sentimentality.

Probably Silvestrov’s best-known work is his fifth symphony (1980-82), a grand ruin of music in a single, slow-moving, forty-five-minute arch, somewhat reminiscent of Mahler, or so I gather - I have yet to get into Mahler’s work myself - and redolent for the most part of mournful elegy, with the occasional flash of menace and malice eventually giving way, in a prolonged coda, to an air of resignation and lassitude. It is the most ambitious example of Silvestrov’s ‘postludes’: a series of compositions of his which strive to exist as echoes and encores of the entire classical tradition, like something that might issue weakly from failing loudspeakers across some post-human wasteland:

Silvestrov no longer feels the need to commence a composition at the beginning, since the contemporary listener has become a memory bank of the music he has already heard. What matters is the accompaniment of the oeuvre in its final estuary. What has already been expressed, tersely and concisely, in the coda of traditional forms, comes to cover the entire composition… Silvestrov’s symphonies are to be perceived as the musical and eschatological coda of great implicit symphonies that silently exist within the listener’s consciousness, but which have not yet been completed… - Frans C. Lemaire.

My response to Silvestrov’s music is highly dependent on my mood: what is achingly lovely and profoundly moving when approached in a patient and reflective frame of mind can otherwise exasperate with its longwindedness, and depress with its narrow emotional range.

The most important lesson of the avant-garde was to be free of all preconceived ideas, particularly those of the avant-garde - Valentin Silvestrov.

*

Posted by misteraitch at June 4, 2003 12:56 PM | TrackBack