Valentyn Sylvestrov

Valentin Vasylyovych Silvestrov (; born 30 September 1937) is a Ukrainian composer and pianist who plays and writes contemporary classical music. He is a laureate of the Shevchenko National Prize.

Biography Valentin Vasylyovych Silvestrov was born on 30 September 1937 in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, then part of the Soviet Union.

Silvestrov began private music lessons at 15. After first teaching himself, he studied piano at the Kyiv Evening Music School from 1955 to 1958 whilst training to become a civil engineer. He attended the Kyiv Conservatory from 1958 to 1964, where he studied musical composition with Borys Lyatoshynsky and harmony and counterpoint with Levko Revutsky. He then taught at a music studio in Kyiv.

In 1974, pressured to conform to socialist realism and trends of modernism, and to apologise for his composers' meeting walkout protesting the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Silvestrov withdrew from the spotlight and began to reject his earlier modernist style, composing the Silent Songs (Тихі Пісні, 1977) cycle for private performance. After the Soviet Union's fall, he composed spiritual and religious works influenced by Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox liturgical music. He traced his rejection of avant-garde techniques to his Kyiv Conservatory years, when Lyatoshynsky asked, "Do you like this?", a question he said was "ingrained in my soul".

His 2004-05 70-minute violin and piano cycle, Melodies of the Moments (Мелодії Миттєвостей), seven works with 22 movements, is intimate and elusive. He describes it as "melodies ... on the boundary between their appearance and disappearance". Elements of Ukrainian nationalism occur in works like Diptych, which sets the words of Taras Shevchenko's prominent patriotic poem "Testament" ("Заповіт", 1845) to music for chorus. He dedicated it in 2014 to Serhiy Nigoyan, the Armenian-Ukrainian Euromaidan activist killed in the 2014 Hrushevsky Street protests, perhaps the first of the Maidan casualties that led to the Revolution of Dignity.

Works Silvestrov's principal and published works include 9 symphonies, poems for piano and orchestra, miscellaneous pieces for chamber orchestra, three string quartets, a piano quintet, three piano sonatas, chamber music, and vocal music (cantatas, songs, etc.).

Discography Silvestrov has released/appeared on 16 albums with ECM, which began a dedicated series to the composer in 2002. This series includes a 1986 archival recording of the song cycle Silent Songs. Albums in ECM's Silvestrov series include:

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

Across all labels, the website Presto Music lists over 140 albums for Silvestrov, including Valentin Silvestrov: Forgotten Word I Wished to Say, released 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 his Silent Songs for Deutsche Grammophon. Grimaud also released a tribute album to Silvestrov on the same label in 2022. Violinist Daniel Hope and pianist Alexey Botvinov released a similar album, also for DG, that same year (which marked the composer's 85th birthday).