How times change. Only a few decades ago, sacred music, if it was heard at all in Russia, was presented in a strictly secular concert setting, and even in many cases with the texts altered to reduce their religious significance. Today though, the Orthodox Church is an influential and highly visible player in Russian public life. So much so that performances of sacred music often take on a ritualistic, even liturgical, dimension of their own. This concert, part of an annual series marking the period of Great Lent in the Orthodox calendar, took place in St Petersburg’s Philharmonic Hall, about as secular a venue as one could imagine, although a Soviet-era bust of Bach in the foyer is clearly intended for veneration of some kind. The music too was presented with full religious honours. An Orthodox priest, resplendent in his flowing robes, spoke before each work, not so much to introduce the music as to remind the audience (congregation?) of the religious significance of the texts. And each work was received fully in that spirit, with the audience retaining a reverential air throughout.
Curiously though, Valentin Silvestrov’s Requiem is a highly postmodern take on the form, and not an obvious choice for such reverential treatment. The work is, technically at least, a setting of the Requiem text, and for the first ten minutes or so it sets the words in a way that might make it suitable for liturgical use. But then it veers off into more ambient realms, reflective perhaps of personal beliefs, but hardly the direct and communal expressions required of liturgy. Silvestrov’s music, here and elsewhere, is all about belatedness. He creates a sense of historical context by often working in an 18th- or 19th-century idiom, but then applying more modern techniques to demonstrate how antiquated those former styles have become. Here, his setting of the Requiem texts often channels those of Fauré, Verdi and Berlioz (the more lyrical passages in those last two settings), but many of the movements are followed by long orchestral postludes where the tonality is blurred and the whole atmosphere becomes more ambiguous. There are also some extended quotes from Mozart (I’m not sure what, but not the Requiem). These are subjected to complex stretto patterns in the strings and, quite inexplicably, accompanied by a wind machine. Some of the writing is very elegant, especially for the choir, which is used in some original ways, but overall the piece remained puzzling.
Only to me, though, it seems. Apparently the Silvestrov Requiem is a real favourite here, and this performance was about the fourth it has received in St Petersburg this year alone. The devout audiences clearly don’t hear Silvestrov’s postmodern tricks as distancing, and certainly not as satire. So perhaps postmodern is the wrong word. The piece clearly expresses things to Orthodox ears that, for the rest of us, must remain a mystery. The performance by these Estonian forces was good, although the choir outclassed the orchestra, who had occasional ensemble problems. But, like the audience, everybody onstage was clearly deep in the spirit of the work, and the performance was appropriately Slavic in all the best senses.