COMPOSERS: Part,Silvestrov,Ustvolskaya
LABELS: ECM Records
ALBUM TITLE: Silvestrov, Pärt, Ustvolskaya
WORKS: Post Scriptum Sonata for Violin and Piano; Misterioso
PERFORMER: Kirill Rybakov (clarinet, piano), Alexander Trostiansky (violin), Alexei Lubimov (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: 476 3108
Commissioned for the bicentenary
of Mozart’s death, Silvestrov’s
1991 Post-Scriptum is the ghost of
a Classical violin sonata, familiar
melodic gestures dissolving into
uneasily rocking ostinatos, cadences
interrupted and frozen in palsied
stasis, signifiers of nostalgia and
regret. It makes a fitting start to this
well-filled CD.
By contrast, Silvestrov’s recent
Misterioso, written for the clarinettist
and pianist Evgeny Orkin, performed
here by Kirill Rybakov, has a bracing
solidity, bold in its dissonance
and expressionistic gestures – an
important addition to the clarinet
repertoire. A new clarinet version of
Pärt’s well-known Spiegel im Spiegel
acts as an exquisite, unworldly
demarcation between Silvestrov and
two of Ustvolskaya’s early chamber
works. Her 1949 Clarinet Trio is
already defiantly odd in its bare
textures, its snatches of ostinato,
its refusal of all rhetoric, as though
Minimalism were struggling to be
born before its time. Much the same
is true, with greater intensity, of the
single-movement Violin Sonata; the
coda, with its dolorous knocking on
the wood of the piano, anticipates the
woodblock tattoos of Ustvolskaya’s
later symphonies.
These are all magnificent
performances, as one might expect
from these three musicians, who
regularly perform together as a trio,
and their sound is superbly and rawly
caught by ECM’s recording. Their
marvellously hieratic account of
Ustvolskaya’s Trio is clearly superior
to the more superficial reading by
The Barton Workshop (on Etcetera).
Trostiansky and Lyubimov come up
against stiff competition in Gidon
Kremer’s mesmerizing account of
Silvestrov’s Post Scriptum, albeit this –
due for reissue on Apex early next year
– is now only available as a download
from www.warnerclassics.com. So as
an anthology of key works in late- and
post-Soviet chamber music this new
disc is eminently recommendable.
Calum MacDonald