Valentyn Silvestrov

This work sets the strongly patriotic words of Taras Shevchenko's 1845 poem Testament (Заповіт), which has a significant national status in Ukraine, and Silvestrov dedicated it in 2014 to the memory of Serhiy Nigoyan, an Armenian-Ukrainian who died in the 2014 Hrushevskoho Street riots and is believed to have been the first Euromaidan casualty that led to the Revolution of Dignity.

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, other piano pieces, chamber music, and vocal music (cantatas, songs, etc.) His works includes:

Silvestrov has recorded 10 albums on the ECM label.

Valentyn Vasylyovych Sylvestrov (Валенти́н Васи́льович Сильве́стров; born 30 September 1937) is a Ukrainian composer and pianist, who plays and writes contemporary classical music.

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

Silvestrov began private music lessons when he was 15.

After first teaching himself, he studied piano at the Kyiv Evening Music School from 1955 to 1958 whilst at the same time training to become a civil engineer.

He attended the Kyiv Conservatory from 1958 to 1964, where he was taught musical composition by Borys Lyatoshynsky, and harmony and counterpoint by Levko Revutsky.

He then taught at a music studio in Kyiv.

Silvestrov was a freelance composer in Kyiv from 1970 to 2022, when he fled from Ukraine following the Russian invasion in February.

He lives in Berlin.

Silvestrov is perhaps best known for his post-modern musical style; some, if not most, of his works could be considered neoclassical and post-modernist.

Using traditional tonal and modal techniques, Silvestrov creates a unique and delicate tapestry of dramatic and emotional textures, qualities which he suggests are otherwise sacrificed in much of contemporary music.

"I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists," Silvestrov has said.

In 1974, under pressure to conform to both official precepts of socialist realism and fashionable modernism, and likewise to apologise for his walkout from a composers' meeting to protest the Soviet Union invasion of Czechoslovakia, Silvestrov chose to withdraw from the spotlight.

In this period he began to reject his previously modernist style.

Instead, he composed Quiet Songs (Тихі Пісні (1977)) a cycle intended to be played in private.

Later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he also began to compose spiritual and religious works influenced by the style of Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox liturgical music.

Silvestrov traced his eventual rejection of avant-garde techniques back to his years in the Kyiv Conservatory.

When presented one of his radical works Lyatoshynsky asked him: "Do you like this?", and while he replied affirmatively "that question became ingrained in my soul".

Silvestrov's recent cycle for violin and piano, Melodies of Instances (Мелодії Миттєвостей), a set of seven works comprising 22 movements to be played in sequence (and lasting about 70 minutes), is intimate and elusive – the composer describes it as "melodies [...] on the boundary between their appearance and disappearance".

Elements of Ukrainian nationalism occur in some of Silvestrov's works, most notably in his choral work Diptych.