Nostalgia-saturated style

CLASSICAL

Toward the end of the Soviet era classical listeners who kept up on such things were being tantalised by talk of a remarkable symphony, his Fifth, written by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. It had been recorded in the then-Soviet Union, but was only available on an impossible-to-find Melodiya LP in a performance from Kiev conducted by Roman Kofman.

VALENTIN SILVESTROV: Symphony No. 4; Symphony No. 5. Lahti Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste. BIS (CD or download)

Most of us had to live with our curiosity until Sony released a CD of the piece in 1996 in an excellent performance conducted by David Robertson. I remember buying a copy in Hong Kong and sitting transfixed with friends there as we listened to the long 45-minute, single-movement symphony. Many others must have been affected in the same way, because Silvestrov is now a much-recorded composer, with many of his later works available on the chic ECM New Series label. But it is probably the Fifth Symphony that comes first into most listeners' minds when his name is mentioned.

Before this new release it had been recorded three times. The original Kofman version was available for about 10 minutes in a CD transfer for BMG's Musica Non Grata label, and both the Robertson account for Sony and a Russian recording by Borejko have been out of print for some time. Good news, then that this new, superbly recorded interpretation by Jukka-Pekka Saraste, a champion of Silvestrov's music, is now being released, and paired with the composer's Fourth Symphony, another fas cinating piece that should be better known.

Saraste's account is leaner and faster than any of the others, but responds eloquently to Silvestrov's nostalgia-saturated style. I've always felt a strong correlation between this composer's later work and some of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky: a cataclysm has come and then receded, taking with it much that was cherished, and that cannot be replaced.

Earlier in his career, during the 1960s and 1970s, Silvestrov wrote in the splintery, international, avant-garde style that was predominant at the time, but retreated from it during the late 1970s. He came to feel that the great Western musical tradition was dying, and began composing a series of works, still conti nuing now, that he conceived as postludes to what had been created in the centuries before.

Most of his mature orchestral works begin with a kind of sonic tsunami, a turbulent roiling of bass-heavy sound that recedes in waves to reveal scoring that evokes the mood of late Romanticism _ in the case of the Fifth Symphony and the one that followed, of Mahler. He is a magical orchestrator who uses instrumental sonorities with great imagination to make the music sound blurred and half-remembered.

You will first get a sense of this poetic technique (and of the work's preoccupation with Mahler) with the appearance of a heartbreaker of an ascending theme in the strings at about 4:00. But it isn't until 13:30 that Silvestrov's ability to give irresistible musical expression to the workings of memory and nostalgia come across at full force. He creates a long-lined theme that would not be out of place in the finales of Mahler's Third or Ninth symphonies, or in the Adagietto fourth movement of the Fifth, and turns it into a dreamscape. Notes played by the strings are quietly sustained to pile up into hazy clusters; a solo harp spins slowly and polytonally around the music, and the entire, iridescent texture swells and recedes as if imperfectly recalled. Impossible to describe and, once heard, to forget.

There are other sonorities the surface briefly throughout the work that would be hard to identify without score in hand. How does Silvestrov create the sibilant, metallic little sonic wraiths that flutter around the brief chorale heard at around 24:00, for example?

The Fourth Symphony finds Silvestrov approaching the style her perfects in the Fifth. Again it is in a single movement (lasting about 25 minutes), and again it progresses as a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative rather than along a firm formal path. It is scored for strings and brass and, like the Fifth, opens forcefully, with huge, polytonal string chords whose shifting harmonies and dense weight suggest a big, dissonant bell. They yield to a lyrical melancholy string melody, very similar to its counterpart in the Fifth. Soon it is beset by swirling, vortex-like ostinati that surface and create tension throughout the piece, eventually arousing menacing brass and escalating to a cataclysm that threatens to consume that symphony.

Like the Fifth, it is splendidly performed and recorded. Listeners who know the earlier recordings may find that there are points in the Fifth Symphony where they miss the hazier sonority and slower tempo they all shared. But Saraste and his musicians and engineers uncover details and emotional tints that others have missed.

This is a brand new release, and so far seems to be available only as a download (the CD is a November release and should be in the online shops shortly). I downloaded my copy, in very good sound, from classicsonline.com.