There is such a strong tendency to think of classical compositions in the abstract, divorced from time and place, but just as with popular songs, classical pieces may have their meanings revealed by specific circumstances. Think of
Sibelius
'
Finlandia
during Britain's World War II war effort.
Valentin Silvestrov
's
Requiem fuer Larissa
is another case in point.
Silvestrov
wrote the work in 1999 after the death of his wife, Larissa. It was premiered on recordings in 2001 on a well-recorded
ECM
release. The live performance heard here, by the
Muenchener Rundfunkorchester
under
Andres Mustonen
, was recorded in Munich's Herz-Jesu-Kirche in 2011, but the work ultimately awaited the release of this album in 2022, when it unmistakably took on the sense of a memorial to Ukraine's war dead. This is extraordinary music. It is not really a requiem mass in the traditional sense, with bits of the Latin mass text floating through tumultuous orchestral textures, only to be abandoned completely for the poem "Prochai svite," an ode on leaving Ukraine by the country's national poet,
Taras Shevchenko
. Here and elsewhere, this is an immensely moving work, combining in
's characteristic way neo-Romantic elements, postmodern quotations (try the Agnus Dei, with the composer quoting his own
Mozart
-like music), and such novel touches as a synthesizer. It is a work that meets its personal ambitions but has a wider significance, and it may come to be seen as a contemporary masterpiece. The church sound here is inferior to that heard on the earlier
recording, but
Mustonen
's reading has a stateliness and a level of detail that are going to be hard to beat. A major highlight of the year 2022. ~ James Manheim