Valentin Silvestrov, Sergey Yakovenko, Ilya Scheps

Silent Songs is the cycle in which Valentin Silvestrov turned away from the Soviet avant-garde toward a music of memory and near silence. Written between 1974 and 1977, it sets 24 poems for baritone and piano, by Russian, Ukrainian and English poets. This double album presents a 1986 Moscow recording that had never been released, together with the first recording of the Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam.

The singer is the baritone Sergey Yakovenko, for whom Silvestrov later wrote the Mandelstam songs as a tribute to his performances of the cycle. Ilya Scheps plays the piano in Silent Songs, and the composer himself accompanies the four Mandelstam settings. The engineer was Pyotr Kondrashin, and Manfred Eicher produced the release for ECM, with liner notes by Paul Griffiths. Silvestrov described the change in his style as a transition rather than a break, saying the avant-garde element "permeates the entire music like a pinch of salt".

The cycle falls into four parts, and with the Mandelstam songs the album runs to nearly two hours, sung almost throughout at the softest dynamic, often marked pppp. The poets include Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Yesenin, Mandelstam, Keats, Shelley and Shevchenko, and the songs follow one another with no change of temperature. Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci stretches to seven minutes of suspended, hovering lines. Lermontov's Mountain Summits pushes the voice toward the top of its range, while Mandelstam's Schubert on Water, near the end, makes the Schubert lineage explicit. Griffiths writes in the booklet that "we may feel we have always known these songs".

In Fanfare, Robert Carl called the cycle "a remarkable, rare flower of a piece" and praised Yakovenko's intensity and restraint. Graham Simpson in International Record Review found it "an absorbing and ultimately moving experience", central to understanding the composer Silvestrov became. Not everyone was won over. On MusicWeb International Bruce Hodges found the unbroken softness monochromatic over two hours, while allowing that some listeners would hear it as ineffably beautiful. The record followed ECM's earlier Silvestrov albums leggiero, pesante, Metamusik/Postludium and Requiem for Larissa.

Issued on ECM New Series in 2004 as a double CD, ECM New Series 1898/99.