Hélène Grimaud (piano), Konstantin Krimmel (baritone)

Nearly twenty years have passed since Hélène Grimaud first encountered Valentin Silvestrov’s Silent Songs, and finally she has found a partner to perform these songs with in the sensational young baritone Konstantin Krimmel. The present selection was recorded at a concert in the Turbine Hall on the Stienitzsee just outside Berlin in the summer of 2022, and it was on this occasion that pianist and composer met for the first time.

The cycle Silent Songs, written between 1974 and 1977 on texts by classic poets, marks an important chapter in Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s creative life. The controversy that it sparked continues to rage today. What was exceptional about the piece was less its sheer length (a duration of two hours without a break was nothing new in early post-modern music); the more surprising feature was found to be its “traditional” structure and, especially, the fact that it came from the pen of one of the leading representatives of the then “Soviet avant-garde”.

The list of Russian classics, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Baratynsky, Zhukovsky, Yesenin and Mandelstam, is complemented by the Ukrainian poet Shevchenko (in Ukrainian) as well as Silvestrov’s beloved English Romantics Keats and Shelley (in Russian translation). The voices of these very different poets here blend together into a new unity, a “harmony of mysterious power” as a line from the Baratynsky poem by that opens Silent Songs has it.