Valentyn Silvestrov

Valentin Vasylyovych Silvestrov (; born 30 September 1937) is a Ukrainian composer and pianist who plays and writes contemporary classical music. He is a laureate of Shevchenko National Prize. Biography Valentin Vasylyovych Silvestrov was born on 30 September 1937 in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, then part of the Soviet Union. Silvestrov began private music lessons at 15. After first teaching himself, he studied piano at the Kyiv Evening Music School from 1955 to 1958 whilst training to become a civil engineer. He attended the Kyiv Conservatory from 1958 to 1964, where he studied musical composition with Borys Lyatoshynsky and harmony and counterpoint with Levko Revutsky. He then taught at a music studio in Kyiv. In 1974, pressured to conform to socialist realism and trends of modernism, and to apologise for his composers’ meeting walkout protesting the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Silvestrov withdrew from the spotlight and began to reject his earlier modernist style, composing the Silent Songs (Тихі Пісні, 1977) cycle for private performance. After the Soviet Union’s fall, he composed spiritual and religious works influenced by Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox liturgical music. He