BBC Music Magazine
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Prokofiev • Silvestrov
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 6; Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Music Aarhus Symphony Orchestra/ Dmitry Matvienko. OUR Recordings 8226936 50:84 mins

Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony was written in the aftermath of the Second World War, some
long years after the composer had moved permanently back to Russia, finding himself increasingly under attack from Soviet diktats on music-making. Intended as an elegy for lives lost in the war and evoking years of toil rather than the glory of the victory, it incurred the wrath of the ever-paranoid Soviet propaganda machine.

Raw, powerful and affecting, it is in many ways an elusive work, a balance of austerity and occasional musical echoes of Prokofiev's pre-war successes. Dmitry Matvienko and the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra give it a finely-judged bite, never recoiling from the implied horror and finely expressive. The first movement is stark and unsettled.
Largo's growling drums and shrieking winds have a monumentality, a steely post-war grimness, segueing tentatively into a more lyrical tone as if speaking of longing, of loss, of heavily tempered grief and hardship, but also of indomitable spirit - doubtless the part that the Soviet authorities missed in their condemnation of the work. The Vivace third movement is a brighter thing, driven,
sidetracked in sliding strings and the interruption of military-style drums, excellently controlled by Matvienko, as if a postwar culture pushing on to the future, but inevitably pierced and forever changed by its past. The effect is cumulative, raw and direct - and by the ending, the whole is incredibly affecting, as the drums and driving beat take over, blasting twice in drama and darkness, an open wound.
The Prokofiev is smoothed over with Valentin Silvestrov's Silent Music (2002), reminiscent, as if heard through a haze of time or dream, and yet curiously expectant. Matvienko and the Aarhus play it with all due attention and delicacy. Sarah Urwin Jones, July Issue