By |

Guest post by Caroline Swinburne

My novel Khrushchev’s Piano (The Book Guild, 28 November) is a re-imagining of the 1958 inaugural Tchaikovsky Competition. The real-life story of how brilliant young American pianist Van Cliburn achieved victory against the odds is well-known, but in my fictional 1960 Rubinstein Brothers’ Competition, it is glamorous British pianist Evie Mason who rises to international acclaim. However, life does not run smoothly for my talented protagonist; decades later we re-encounter Evie, now a disabled and impoverished old lady living in a failing care home and still struggling to make sense of events dating from her time in Soviet Russia.

Every chapter of my book is introduced by a different piece of piano music. Often the music is played by my characters; on a few occasions it simply reflects the mood. Much of this repertoire is Russian or Soviet, including several pieces performed at the “real” 1958 competition.

When I began writing the book back in 2017, Ukraine was little known on the world stage. Even though the country had already endured the annexation of Crimea and years of fighting in the Donbas, it rarely made the headlines in Western news reports. But Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 changed that overnight and I could not ignore the implications if I wanted my novel to have historical credence. As a result, I rewrote some of my contemporary storyline to reflect developments, and also changed some of the repertoire. It was through this that I first encountered the extraordinary piano music of Valentyn Sylvestrov – or, to use his preferred international form of the name, Valentin Silvestrov.

Silvestrov is one of Ukraine’s most distinguished living composers. Although sadly still little-known in the UK, he is more popular elsewhere in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries. His published work includes symphonies, pieces for chamber orchestra, chamber music and vocal music. But it is his solo piano compositions that many would consider that his most intimate voice is found, especially in his many lovely piano miniatures.

Silvestrov was born in Kyiv in 1937. This makes him the same age as my fictional protagonist, and his life spans exactly the same period as my novel – including the final decades of Stalinism, the Khrushchev “Thaw”, Ukraine’s independence in 1991 and, most recently, the Russian invasion of his homeland. But despite this dramatic political backcloth, the composer’s musical style has remained unique, independent and personal.

By the time of my fictional competition in 1960, Silvestrov was a student at the Kyiv Conservatory, where he studied composition with Borys Liatoshynsky and counterpoint with Levko Revutsky. Liatoshynsky, more than forty years his senior, had once been a pioneering Ukrainian modernist, but belonged to a generation whose artistic freedom had been severely curtailed by Soviet ideology. However, as a teacher, he encouraged younger composers including Silvestrov to pursue their own ideas.

Fortunately, this was a time when the Khrushchev “Thaw” was opening up new possibilities, and after graduating, for a while Silvestrov became closely associated with the Kyiv Avant-Garde, a loose circle of composers including Leonid Hrabovsky, Vitalii Hodziatskyi and Volodymyr Zahortsev. The group were keenly interested in Western modernism – from Webern and the Second Viennese School to the experiments emerging from Darmstadt – but also concerned to develop their own distinctive musical language within the wider artistic and intellectual life in 1960s Kyiv.

Silvestrov’s music soon began to attract international attention. German philosopher, musicologist and social theorist Theodor Adorno described him as an ‘extraordinarily gifted’ composer. In September 1968, Bruno Maderna conducted the world premiere of his third symphony, Eschatophony, at the Darmstadt Summer Courses – a principal centre of the European avant-garde. In 1967 the work was awarded the Koussevitzky Music Foundation Prize and three years later his Hymn received an honorary distinction at the Gaudeamus International Composers Competition in Utrecht.

Silvestrov was not a natural rebel; he described his relationship with Soviet institutions as a kind of gentle non‑compliance and emphasised that he simply wrote the music he felt compelled to write. From the 1970s onwards he moved away from radical modernism towards what he described as a ‘metaphorical’ style – a way of writing which absorbed echoes of the past without simply reverting to traditional tonality. This was not a response to political repression, but rather part of a deeper artistic journey – a conscious artistic decision made by a composer who had already achieved international recognition.

Kitsch-Musik, written in 1977, is one of the most important and frequently performed of his early piano works and marks his transition towards this new style. The piano cycle is published by Schott Music, whose catalogue includes many of Silvestrov’s best-known scores, although much of the composer’s later work, including many piano miniatures, have  sadly never appeared in print. However, many of the unpublished works have been recorded – often by the composer himself – and are readily available in a large online archive, at https://silvestrov.bandcamp.com/

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Silvestrov fled Kyiv with his daughter and granddaughter and has since lived in Berlin. Although he is aged nearly ninety and has hearing problems, he has continued to compose prolifically; for a while he continued to post regular recordings of his music in the Bandcamp archive. However, in recent years, his own performances have become less frequent, and many recent premieres and recordings have been entrusted to the Ukrainian pianist Evgeny Gromov, one of the foremost interpreters and champions of the composer’s piano music.

In my book, I feature Silvestrov’s lovely Three Bagatelles op 1. These works, written in 2005, are intimate, lyrical and accessible. Comparing the compositions to his larger works, the composer wrote: ‘My second Sonata, for example, is a concert piece, and is not designed to be played in a domestic setting. But [the piano miniatures] are pieces which one can play (or listen to) at home, even if they require a subtle use of the pedal and sophisticated timbres. These are, as it were, domestic animals such as cats, whereas the works based on a philosophical idea can be compared to tigers, which are also cats, though it is impossible to keep them as domestic animals.’ (Music Is the Song the World Sings About Itself ed. Marina Nestieva, Kyiv, 2004, Russian)

Tame, domestic cats they may be, and at first sight the notes themselves seem relatively straightforward. However, as I soon discovered when I attempted to play the pieces myself, Silvestrov’s piano music poses significant challenges if the performer is to do full justice to the composer’s vision. Minutely notated nuances of duration, dynamics, tempo and pedalling are an integral part of the compositions, and take time, attention and thorough practice to master effectively.

‘The expressive meaning [of Silvestrov’s music] resides less in the notes themselves than in their breathing, timing, decay and infinitesimal dynamic inflections,’ says Yar Godyna, who curates the composer’s online archive and knows the composer well. ‘This music demands an exceptional sensitivity to tone, timing, pedalling and the natural decay of sound. It also requires patience: one has to resist the temptation to “express” too much or to impose an overt personal interpretation. The music speaks quietly, and the performer has to trust that quietness.’

However, Godyna thinks that much of Silvestrov’s later piano music is technically accessible to a good amateur pianist as long as he or she is prepared to be thorough. He suggests beginning with Kitsch-Music or the published Bagatelles, which are accessible and provide an excellent introduction to the composer’s musical language. ‘Above all, I would advise [the would-be performer] to listen carefully to Sylvestrov’s own performances on the bootcamp archive. He rarely treats the score mechanically; despite the extraordinary detail of his notation, his playing sounds remarkably free, almost improvised. That apparent paradox is perhaps the most important lesson for anyone approaching his music.’

Drawing parallels with the writing of Erik Satie, Godyna considers that Silvestrov’s piano works: ‘reward maturity more than virtuosity. A pianist with a beautiful touch, a sense of silence and the ability to sustain long musical lines will often be more convincing than a brilliant virtuoso who approaches the music as a display of technique. [Silvestrov’s piano miniatures] demand an exceptional sensitivity to tone, timing, pedalling and the natural decay of sound. [They] also require  patience: one has to resist the temptation to “express” too much or to impose an overt personal interpretation. The music speaks quietly, and the performer has to trust that quietness.’

Khrushchev’s Piano will be published by The Book Guild on 28 November

www.carolineswinburne.com

Pianist Konstantin Lapshin will be performing a recital of music from Khrushchev’s Piano, including some works by Valentin Silvestrov, at the 1901 Arts Club on Friday 5th March 2027

Useful resources

  • Silvestrov’s writings and conversations have been published in several collections, including (Music Is the Song the World Sings About Itself ed. Marina Nestieva, Kyiv, 2004, Russian) and the later Waiting for Music (Дочекатися музики) and Meetings with Valentin Silvestrov (Зустрічі з Валентином Сильвестровим), published in Ukrainian by Dukh i Litera.

By |

If you enjoy this site, you might like to visit my new Substack page where, writing under my own name, I share more personal musings on music, creativity, artistic identity, memory, Dorset, food, gardening – and whatever else catches my interest. Click the image below to visit my Substack.

Frances Wilson ON MUSIC & WRITING

By |

Pianists remember pianos.

Not necessarily because they were exceptional instruments. Sometimes quite the opposite! We remember the piano in a childhood home, the battered upright in a school music room, a particularly lovely grand encountered at a teacher’s house, an instrument played in a concert hall, or a piano discovered unexpectedly somewhere far from home. We remember their touch and sound, the peculiarities of their actions, even the smell of the room in which they stood. And sometimes we remember them because of the people who played them before us.

The piano is a machine, but it usually has a soul, and a history too. My 1913 C. Bechstein Model A is redolent of Edwardian drawing rooms. It may well have been sold from the Bechstein piano showroom on Wigmore Street, next door to Bechstein – now Wigmore – Hall, in that golden year when a carefree generation was teetering on the abyss of the First World War. I acquired it in 2013, exactly a century after it was made, a coincidence which seemed especially serendipitous and significant, given the subject matter of the novel I had begun writing some ten years earlier.

Some years ago, I played a Steinway D with a special heritage. Formerly owned by the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, it had been played by Sviatoslav Richter and Daniel Barenboim, amongst others. “And now you are playing it!” said its owner, for whose music society I was performing. I’ve also played a square piano owned and autographed by Edward Elgar, a Pleyel said to have been played by Chopin, and an extraordinary ‘Maori’ Steinway, which had belonged to the pianist Lili Kraus. There is a danger, of course, that one can invest too much in these associations, imagining that something of former owners and players remains in the keys and strings and might somehow influence the next person who sits down to play. In reality, it is the pianist at the keyboard now who ignites the soul of the instrument and brings it to life in sound.

Given that Theo Browne, the principal character in my novel Facing the Music, is an ambitious young concert pianist, it was inevitable that pianos would feature prominently in the narrative. Theo encounters a succession of pianos as his life unfolds, each one marking a particular stage in his musical and emotional development. Later in the book, those same instruments become repositories of memory, bound to the people, places and experiences that have shaped him, so that a piano is never simply a piano, but a connection to an earlier period or version of his life.

There is his mother’s Pleyel, the piano of childhood and his earliest encounters with the instrument which will come to define him. Before there is ambition, career or even any real conception of himself as a musician, there is simply the fascination of the keyboard and the discovery of music.

At school there is a Blüthner, an instrument which becomes associated with two of the defining relationships of Theo’s musical life. Here he studies with Mr Hines, whose influence will extend far beyond piano lessons, and here too his deep friendship and musical partnership with violinist Jonathan Lane-Fox begins to take shape – a partnership which lies at the heart of the novel. Teacher and friend offer Theo different kinds of musical companionship: Mr Hines guides and challenges him, while with Jonathan he discovers the particular intimacy of making music with another person.

At Mr Hines’s home in Battersea stands his Broadwood, the piano on which Theo practises Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, with Mr Hines beside him at the second piano, taking the orchestral reduction. The scene is charged with ambition: this is the repertoire Theo hopes will belong to his future, music of the international concert platform and the career he is beginning to imagine for himself. But the Broadwood also becomes deeply bound up with Theo’s memories of his beloved teacher, and of the musical life they shared. As the novel unfolds, it acquires a significance that reaches beyond the instrument itself.

Sir Ralph Kaufman’s Steinway has a history which long predates Theo’s first encounter with it. It belonged to Ralph’s father, Jakob, a concert pianist from Vienna, and carries with it the traces of a musical life from an earlier generation. When Theo first sits down at it, he is intimidated by its pedigree and by everything it seems to represent: “This was no ordinary instrument. It was a witness. It had travelled, and it had lived.” But as Theo’s relationship with the Kaufman family deepens, so too does his relationship with the Steinway. Gradually it acquires another layer of associations, becoming a repository not only for the Kaufman family’s musical past, but for Theo’s own memories and experiences.

And then comes the C. Bechstein concert grand at Bechstein (now Wigmore) Hall. For Theo, sitting at that piano represents arrival: the concert platform at a prestigious London venue, an audience, and the beginning of the career towards which he has been working for years.

Later, in France, Theo, now an Army officer, encounters a very different instrument: a dilapidated Érard in a château where his battalion is billeted. By then, a piano means something quite different. It is no longer primarily an instrument of ambition or professional advancement. In surroundings unimaginably distant from concert halls and daily practice, the mere presence of a keyboard offers a connection with another life.

I love the physical presence of the piano – from a domestic upright to the grandest Steinway D – as much a piece of furniture as an instrument from which to conjure sound. I love the piano’s complexity, and the way it always seems to invite us to touch it. Put a piano in a public place and people are drawn to it: they will sit down and play, while even those who cannot play are tempted to press the keys, curious to hear the sound they can make. And a piano invites repeated physical contact. Hands have pressed its keys thousands, perhaps millions, of times. Someone practised scales on it, someone struggled with a Beethoven sonata, someone played for a teacher, accompanied a friend, prepared for a concert, played badly, played wonderfully, or simply sat down one evening and played for pleasure.

Perhaps pianos do not remember us at all. My Bechstein keeps its first hundred years of history to itself. We are the ones who supply the memories. We attach people, places, pieces of music and particular periods of our lives to these complicated machines of wood and felt, wire and iron. Yet the moment someone sits at the keyboard, the machine becomes something else. It sounds, responds, resists, sings – and another memory begins.

Which pianos do you remember?

Not necessarily the finest one you have ever played, but the instrument that has stayed with you: your childhood piano, your teacher’s grand, the terrible upright in the school practice room, a concert instrument you were reluctant to leave, or a piano with a history that made you think differently as you placed your hands on its keys.

Leave a comment below or contact me with your piano memories.

Facing the Music is out now in paperback and eBook. Find out more

  • Halle Steinway
  • My C Bechstein A