Born in Kiev in 1937, he came to music relatively late, at the age of fifteen, and was initially self-taught. From 1955 to 1958 he took courses at an evening music school while training to become a civil engineer. From 1958 to 1964 he studied composition and counterpoint, respectively, with Boris Lyatoshinsky and Lev Revutsky at Kiev Conservatory. He has been a freelance composer in Kiev since 1970. He is considered one of the leading representatives of the ‘Kiev avant-garde’, which came to public attention around 1960 and was violently criticized by the proponents of the conservative Soviet musical aesthetic. In the 1960s and 1970s his music was hardly played in his native city; premieres, if given at all, were heard only in Russia, primarily in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), or in the West. His Spectrums for chamber orchestra, for example, was premiered to spectacular acclaim by the Leningrad Philharmonic under the baton of Igor Blashkov in 1965. In 1968 the same conductor gave the premiere of Silvestrov’s Second Symphony.
In 1967, Silvestrov was awarded the Koussevitzky Prize. Despite this accolade and successful performances of his works in the West, he was not allowed to travel abroad and his music met with no response in his own country. This situation gradually changed with Silvestrov’s growing international acclaim. One of his earliest champions was the American pianist and conductor Virko Baley, who brought about the Las Vegas performances of Postludium for piano and orchestra (1985) and the symphony Exegi monumentum (1988) as well as a Valentin Silves-trov 50th Birthday Concert in New York (1988).
Silvestrov became a visiting composer at the Almeida Festival in London (1989), Gidon Kremer’s Lockenhaus Festival in Austria (1990), and various festivals in Denmark, Finland, and Holland.
Since the end of the 1980s, the number of performances has increased, even in Russia and the Ukraine. Silvestrov’s music was heard at the ‘Alternative’ New Music Festival in Moscow (1989), ‘Five Evenings with the Music of Valentin Silvestrov’ (Ekaterinburg, 1992), ‘Sofia Gubaidulina and Her Friends’ (St Petersburg, 1994), ‘Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt, Valentin Silvestrov’ (Moscow, 1995), and the Silvestrov 60th Birthday Festival (Kiev, 1998). At the latter event,
a scholarly conference devoted to Silvestrov was held at the Tchaikovsky National Academy of Music of the Ukraine (formerly Kiev Conservatory). During the 1990s, Silvestrov’s music was heard throughout Europe as well as in Japan and the United States. In 1998–99, he was a visiting fellow of the German Academic Exchange Programme daad in Berlin, where three of his works have been premiered to date: Metamusic (1993), Dedication for violin and orchestra (1993), and Sixth Symphony (2002).
In recent decades Silvestrov has forged a style comparable to Western ‘post-modernism’ but he has preserved his independence of outlook. He describes his new style as ‘metamusic’. Of all the many translations of the Greek particle ‘meta’, he prefers ‘supra’ or ‘ultra’. He regards metamusic as ‘a semantic overtone of music’. In a certain sense, ‘metamusic’ is also a synonym for a universal style and language that belongs to no one but can be used by anyone in his or her own way. His music has affinities with the age of the ‘classical’ fin-de-siŹcle, especially Gustav Mahler, with whom Silvestrov is often compared. The difference is that the lexicon of today is unlimited. This limitlessness forces composers to search for the lost ontological meaning of music as art. In Silvestrov’s view, one of the crucial prerequisites for the continued existence of music resides in melody. This has found expression in the remarkable role that vocal music has played in his musical output. In his view, ‘poetry is the salvaging of all that is most essential, namely, melody as a holistic and inalienable organism. Either this organism is there, or it is not. For it seems to me that music is song in spite of everything, even when it is unable to sing in a literal sense. Not a philosophy, not a system of beliefs, but the song of the world about itself, and at the same time a musical testament to existence’.
‘I am not a minimalist’, Silvestrov says about himself, ‘Nor am I a composer who works in so-called retro or neo styles, much less in New Age or other musics. I hope I’ve found a style of my own. This style, especially in my large-scale symphonic forms, must be governed by something more than such ‘negative’ concepts as retro, nostalgia, and so forth. Indeed, I’m a lyricist in my way of thinking. I can say: my main concern is poetry in music.’