Fanfare 5
*****
A revelatory coupling throws new light on the Prokofiev you thought you knew.

 PROKOFIEV Symphony No. 6. SILVESTROV Quiet Music ● Dmitry Matvienko, cond; Aarhus SO; Lumbye Academy ● OUR RECORDINGS 8.226936 (50:54) Reviewed from a WAV download: 44.1 kHz/24-bit
What does it take to make a genuinely compelling case for yet another recording of Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony? The catalogue is absurdly crowded—Mravinsky, Rozhdestvensky, Gergiev, Currentzis, and a dozen more besides—and each new contender has to answer a blunt question: what are you bringing that we haven’t already heard? Dmitry Matvienko’s answer, with his Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, turns out to be disarmingly simple and profoundly right. More than any single interpretive gesture, what distinguishes this performance is its command of the Prokofievan equilibrium—that precarious balance between sardonic detachment and genuine emotional exposure that so many conductors fumble. Lean too heavily into the music’s apparent hard-edgedness and you end up with something merely aggressive, all surface and no soul. Try to soften it, to coax out a warmth the score only intermittently permits, and the result is no less fatal. Matvienko finds his way through with a calibration that feels almost preternatural in a conductor still in the relatively early stages of his career. This is emphatically a reading of a symphony haunted by a war just fought, but it wears its seriousness without a trace of bombast: joy here is a fleeting, ambiguous visitor, and triumphalism is simply absent.
Matvienko has also made the striking decision to couple the Prokofiev with Valentin Silvestrov’s Quiet Music (2002), and it is an unexpected but deeply considered pairing. The Sixth ends in convulsion, a shattering orchestral detonation that Prokofiev himself described as “a question dropped into eternity.” To follow that with Silvestrov’s luminous, near-static tenderness—three brief movements totaling barely ten minutes—is not merely a programmatic contrast but something closer to a response: where the symphony asks its unanswerable question, Silvestrov offers not an answer but a kind of quiet reckoning, a space in which to breathe. The effect in sequence is remarkable.
The symphony itself was composed between 1945 and 1947, its three movements shadowed by the devastation of war, but resisting reduction to any simple programme. Prokofiev spoke of “unhealed wounds” and the impossibility of forgetting what had been suffered, but the music is far more elusive than even those rather general statements of intent. Matvienko exploits the contrasts within the opening Allegro moderato with extraordinary skill. The movement begins with a deliberately flat, uninflected severity—those grinding, abrasive opening bars set out as if refusing to seduce—and when the lyrical second subject arrives, it does so with an almost painful fragility, entirely without sentimentality. What’s striking is how Matvienko lets the tension between these two poles generate its own drama rather than forcing a narrative onto the music. The detail as the movement develops is superb: inner voices emerge with clarity, the orchestral balances shift with a kind of organic inevitability, and the transition from the movement’s dark opening to its major-key close feels genuinely earned rather than merely structural.
The Largo is devastating. Its opening is bleak, almost barren, the woodwind cry at the outset hanging in the air before the deep strings introduce a melody of aching tenderness, the kind of writing that reminds you this is also the composer of Romeo and Juliet. But Matvienko never allows the beauty to settle. Each time the music approaches something like repose, it is undercut or dissolved, and the movement’s overall arc traces a pattern of longing that is never quite fulfilled. The playing of the Aarhus strings in this movement is exceptionally fine. Then comes the finale, and here Matvienko is at his most assured, juggling the movement’s constantly shifting moods with a conductor’s instinct for when to let the music’s apparent high spirits run and when to pull back to reveal the darker undertow. The return of the folk-song-like side theme from the first movement, arriving after a stretch of seemingly buoyant, patriotic energy, is one of the most wrenching moments in all Prokofiev, and Matvienko shapes it with an unforced gravity that is deeply affecting. The symphony’s final bars, with their unresolved harmonic ambiguity, are left to hang in the air, exactly as they should be.
Silvestrov, born in Kyiv in 1937, began as an avant-gardist whose work was suppressed in the Soviet Union but gained increasing recognition in the West. Over the decades his language has shifted profoundly, towards what he calls a music of memory and reflection, a distilled, post-tonal lyricism in which time itself seems to slow almost to stillness. Quiet Music is scored for a modest ensemble—strings, with the lean, exposed textures that Silvestrov’s late manner demands. Its three brief movements (“Waltz of the Moment,” “Evening Serenade,” “Moments of the Serenade”) hover at the edge of audibility, their gently circling cadential figures creating a sense of suspended anticipation, as though the music were perpetually on the point of arriving somewhere it never quite reaches. After the searing emotional landscape of the Prokofiev, the effect is very moving. And Matvienko proves himself perfectly attuned to the idiom, minutely adjusting dynamics and phrasing with a sensitivity that is somehow different in character from the orchestral command he brings to the symphony, yet recognizably the product of the same musical intelligence.
Matvienko is clearly a major talent. Winner of the Malko Competition, now Chief Conductor at Aarhus, he brings to both works a combination of interpretive boldness and scrupulous attention to detail that speaks of real musicianship and discernment. The Aarhus Symphony Orchestra respond with playing of consistent excellence, warm, precise, and committed throughout. The recorded sound, captured in the Symphonic Hall in Aarhus, is first-rate: spacious and detailed, with an entirely natural concert-hall perspective that serves both the orchestral heft of the Prokofiev and the delicate intimacy of the Silvestrov equally well. Dominic Hartley