Valentin Vasylyovych Silvestrov (Ukrainian: Валенти́н Васи́льович Сильве́тров), also known as Valentyn Vasilyevich Sylvestrov and Valentyn Vasil′yovych Sil'vestrov, was born on September 30, 1937. He is a Ukrainian composer and pianist who creates and performs modern classical music. He has won the Shevchenko National Prize.
Biography
Valentin Vasylyovych Silvestrov was born on 30 September 1937 in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, which was part of the Soviet Union.
Silvestrov began private music lessons when he was 15. After teaching himself first, he studied piano at the Kyiv Evening Music School from 1955 to 1958 while training to become a civil engineer. He attended the Kyiv Conservatory from 1958 to 1964, where he learned musical composition from Borys Lyatoshynsky and studied harmony and counterpoint with Levko Revutsky. After that, he taught music at a studio in Kyiv.
Silvestrov worked as a freelance composer in Kyiv from 1970 to 2022. He left Kyiv and moved to Berlin after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Music
Silvestrov is best known for his postmodern music, some of which is also considered neoclassical. He uses traditional tonal and modal techniques to create soft and detailed mix of emotions and drama, which he believes are often missing in modern music. He once said, "I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists."
In 1974, Silvestrov faced pressure to follow socialist realism and modernist trends. He was also asked to apologize for a group of composers who had walked out during a protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Because of these pressures, Silvestrov stepped away from public attention and stopped creating music in his earlier modernist style. Instead, he composed a private work called Silent Songs (Тихі Пісні, 1977). After the Soviet Union ended, he began writing spiritual and religious music inspired by Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox traditions. He explained that his rejection of avant-garde techniques started during his time at the Kyiv Conservatory, when a teacher named Lyatoshynsky asked him, "Do you like this?" This question, he said, remained with him for a long time.
His recent 70-minute violin and piano work, Melodies of the Moments (Мелодії Миттєвостей), includes seven pieces with 22 movements. He describes it as "melodies… on the edge of appearing and disappearing." Some of his works, like Diptych, include Ukrainian national themes. This piece sets the words of Taras Shevchenko's famous patriotic poem Testament (Заповіт, 1845) to music for a choir. In 2014, he dedicated Diptych to Serhiy Nigoyan, an Armenian-Ukrainian activist who was killed during the 2014 Hrushevsky Street protests. These protests were among the first events that led to the Revolution of Dignity.
Works
Silvestrov's main works include nine symphonies, pieces for piano and orchestra, other pieces for chamber orchestra, three string quartets, a piano quintet, three piano sonatas, chamber music, and vocal music such as cantatas and songs.
Discography
Valentin Silvestrov has appeared on 16 albums with the label ECM. In 2002, ECM started a special series of albums featuring Silvestrov’s music. This series includes a 1986 recording of the song cycle Silent Songs. The albums in ECM’s Silvestrov series are:
- leggiero, pesante (2002) — ECM 1776
- Metamusik/Postludium (2003) — ECM 1790
- Requiem for Larissa (2004) — ECM 1778
- Silent Songs (2004) — ECM 1898/99
- Symphony No. 6 (2007) — ECM 1935
- Bagatellen und Serenaden (2007) — ECM 1988
- Sacred Works (2009) — ECM 2117
- Sacred Songs (2012) — ECM 2279
- Hieroglyphen der Nacht (2017) — ECM 2389
- Maidan (2022) — ECM 2359
According to the website Presto Music, Silvestrov’s music has been released on more than 140 albums across different labels. These include Valentin Silvestrov: Forgotten Word I Wished to Say, released in 2022 on Sony Classical by pianist Alexei Lubimov and soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko. Lubimov also released Silvestrov: …flowering Over Lethe… on the label Fuga Libera in 2025.
In 2023, pianist Hélène Grimaud and baritone Konstantin Krimmel recorded Silent Songs for Deutsche Grammophon. Grimaud also released an album that honors Silvestrov on the same label in 2022. In the same year, violinist Daniel Hope and pianist Alexey Botvinov released a similar album for Deutsche Grammophon, which marked Silvestrov’s 85th birthday.