A New Kid on the Block: An Interview with Conductor Dmitry Matvienko
BY MICHAEL VAILLANCOURT

For his debut album on the OUR label, conductor Dmitry Matvienko chose the unusual pairing of Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony and Valentin Silvestrov’s Quiet Music (or Silent Music). I asked him about his relationship to the music of these composers, as well as the pros and cons of studio recording versus live performance.

Your new album features music by Prokofiev and Silvestrov. Most listeners will know something of Prokofiev, but Silvestrov is a new name for many. Can you tell us a little about him and his music?
For me, Silvestrov is a composer who cannot really be described only in terms of style, because what matters most in him is not a set of techniques, but a very special relationship to the very idea of music. In his early years, he was one of the boldest representatives of the avant-garde of his generation, a composer with a remarkably radical ear. But later he made a very rare and, I think, very courageous turn: instead of pushing complexity further and further, he moved toward extreme simplicity, fragility, and an almost vanishing kind of utterance. And this was not a retreat or a compromise. On the contrary, it was a different form of artistic fearlessness.
I often think of Silvestrov as a composer not simply of “quiet music,” but of music after music. His works can sound fragile, transparent, almost elusive, yet behind that quietness there is not calm, but an intense work of memory. His music seems not so much to declare something new as to listen to what has already been said. One can sometimes hear distant echoes of Schubert, Mahler, or Tchaikovsky, but this is never imitation or stylization. It is more like an attempt to hear how culture continues to live in resonance, in recollection, in aftersound.
And this is why, as a personality as well as a composer, he strikes me as such a paradoxical figure: there is an extraordinary delicacy in him, but also absolute inner firmness. His music never imposes itself on the listener and never tries to conquer by effect. It speaks almost in a half-voice, yet that half-voice can carry more truth than the grandest gesture. In his case, silence or near-silence is not the absence of meaning, but a very special form of presence. Sometimes it even feels as if he is working not only with sound itself, but with what remains around it—the memory of a melody, its trace, its disappearance.
That is why the idea of Quiet Music is so important in Silvestrov. It should not be understood literally as music that is simply played softly. It is a music of inward listening, of extreme attentiveness, almost of trust in a single sound. There is something profoundly human in that—a refusal of rhetoric, of pressure, of the need to persuade at all costs. Silvestrov seems to remind us that the most important things in art are often said not loudly, but almost imperceptibly.
And that also creates, for me, a very beautiful bridge to Prokofiev. Prokofiev is a composer of gesture, contour, energy, and often of dazzling clarity. Silvestrov, by contrast, seems to exist after that gesture—not in the space of direct assertion, but in the space of memory. In Prokofiev, music speaks, acts, declares itself; in Silvestrov, it remembers, listens, and lets the sound recede inward. So placed together, they do not form a contrast for its own sake, but a very deep dialogue: between statement and echo, between energy and remembrance, between presence and aftersound.
Have you conducted much of Silvestrov’s music before? What do you think is important when preparing and performing his scores?
I have never conducted Silvestrov’s music before, but I have listened to it and studied it very often over the years. I first encountered it in Moscow, and I also heard it performed in the subscription concerts of the Moscow Philharmonic, where it was conducted by Vladimir Jurowski and other conductors. So even if I am coming to it now as a conductor for the first time, it is not unfamiliar music to me. It has been part of my listening life for a long time.
Perhaps that is also important with Silvestrov: before one can perform this music, one has to learn how to listen to it. His musical world is so delicate and so inward that it cannot be approached superficially. It asks for patience, concentration, and a very particular sensitivity to sound, to timing, and to silence.
What I find especially important in preparing his scores is not to over-interpret them. On the page, the writing can sometimes look disarmingly simple, but in performance that simplicity is incredibly demanding. Everything depends on proportion, on breathing, on the natural unfolding of a phrase, and on the way one sound resonates into the next. Very often, the most important thing in Silvestrov is not only the note itself, but its echo, its afterlife.
I also think it is essential not to confuse quietness with passivity. His music is quiet, but it is never empty. Beneath its fragility there is enormous emotional intensity, and also a very strong inner discipline. As performers, we have to preserve that balance: the music should remain tender and transparent, but it must never become vague, sentimental, or merely atmospheric.
So, for me, preparing Silvestrov is above all about creating a shared state of listening—within the orchestra, within the ensemble, and ultimately in the hall. If that attention is truly there, then his music can have an extraordinary impact, precisely because it does not try to impose itself. It speaks quietly, but it goes very deep.
Many conductors of the old school insisted that they disliked making recordings and rarely or never listened to them. That has changed in the last few generations with musicians who grew up listening to records. Has your work on the Sixth Symphony been influenced by the recordings of any of the great Prokofiev conductors of the past such as Mravinsky or Ormandy?
Yes, absolutely. I think for musicians of my generation, recordings are not something secondary—they are part of how we grow into the repertoire. They do not replace one’s own ideas, of course, but they can shape one’s ear very profoundly, especially when one is dealing with a composer as complex and multi-layered as Prokofiev.
In my case, a number of recordings have been very important. I have been deeply influenced by performances conducted by Neeme Järvi, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Evgeny Mravinsky, and Vladimir Jurowski. Each of them opens a different perspective on Prokofiev. With Mravinsky, one feels an extraordinary sense of tension, architecture, and almost implacable dramatic logic. Rozhdestvensky brings, for me, a special sharpness of character and an ability to reveal how unpredictable and psychologically complex this music is. Neeme Järvi has a remarkable instinct for line, momentum, and orchestral color. And Vladimir Jurowski has been especially important to me not only through his performances, but also through personal conversations we have had about Prokofiev—about the content of this music, its formal construction, its inner proportions, and the particular challenge of reconciling classical clarity with emotional ambiguity.
Those influences matter to me, but not as models to imitate. Rather, they form part of a long interpretive tradition that one enters into and responds to. Recordings can teach us a great deal—about sound, about structure, about pacing, about the weight of certain climaxes or the meaning of certain transitions. But in the end, one still has to arrive at a personal relationship with the score.
And for me, that relationship with Prokofiev is a very deep one. I conduct a great deal of his music, and I would say that he is one of my central composers, alongside Mahler, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. What fascinates me in Prokofiev is precisely that unique combination of brilliance and severity, irony and lyricism, formal discipline and emotional instability. The Sixth Symphony, in particular, is a work in which all of those contradictions are present at once, and that is one reason it speaks to me so strongly.
So yes, recordings have certainly influenced my work on this symphony. But ideally their influence should not be audible as quotation or imitation. It should remain inward—as part of one’s memory, one’s listening experience, and one’s ongoing dialogue with the score.
When it comes to making recordings, do you see this as something fundamentally different from live performances, or do you see it as a process of trying to recreate the conditions of a concert?
I think recording is fundamentally different from live performance because it involves a completely different set of tasks and a completely different kind of interaction with the music.
On the one hand, the studio gives you a very special possibility: you can think through every phrase, every balance, every intonation, every articulation, and try to achieve something almost crystal-clear in terms of quality. That level of control is one of the great advantages of recording.
But at the same time, that is exactly where the greatest difficulty begins. The real challenge is not just to polish individual passages. The challenge is to record in large spans—sometimes even to play an entire work straight through—and still keep both the technical quality and the emotional voltage of the piece as a whole. In fact, sometimes a complete take can be more convincing than something built out of many fragments, precisely because it preserves a stronger sense of line, form, and inner necessity.
So the real question is always how to unite those two things: the highest level of precision and the living energy of a full performance. Quality, in a sense, has to become almost a given; it must be there as a foundation. But the thought behind the music, the direction, the emotional meaning, must never be lost. And that, to me, is the most difficult part of recording.
There is also another important dimension. Once everything is prepared and you begin listening back, you start to think more globally about the purpose of the recording itself. What is the meaning of making this recording now? What does this work say in our present moment? The context of our time is completely different, and that inevitably changes the way we hear a piece, the way we shape it, and the way we communicate it. So, one always has to begin from the time in which one is recording and ask what makes this music urgent and relevant today.
That is why the inner state in the studio is so different from the feeling of a concert. In every take, you have to remind yourself that this is not an isolated fragment, but part of a larger whole. The sound quality and precision must be there, of course, but they cannot become the main idea. The main idea must remain alive through every take, through every section, through the entire process. And preserving that larger thought while working under the microscope of recording is, I think, the hardest and most fascinating part of it.
The Sixth has always been my favorite piece of Prokofiev. I am disappointed that it has never really been as popular as his Fifth Symphony. Why do you think that is the case?
I absolutely agree that the Sixth is Prokofiev’s greatest symphony. I love the Fifth very much as well, but the Sixth is something else—it feels like a true revelation.
I think one reason it has never become as broadly popular as the Fifth is precisely because it is a much more disturbing and prophetic work. The Fifth has a more immediate brilliance, a more public symphonic profile, whereas the Sixth speaks in a darker, more complex, and more wounded language. It does not offer the listener the same kind of immediate triumph or affirmation.
What is extraordinary to me about the Sixth is that it feels almost like a warning. In this symphony, Prokofiev seems to look far beyond his own moment, almost into the future. There is something uncannily prophetic in it—not only in its emotional depth, but in its sense of danger, of instability, of the fragility of human life and civilization. That is why the work feels so overwhelming to me: it is not only a reflection on tragedy, but almost a call to remain alert to it.
And sadly, I think that is one reason the symphony remains so actual today. The wheel of war keeps turning. History seems to move in cycles: a few generations pass, and then the same forces return again in new forms. In that sense, the Sixth has not lost its relevance at all. On the contrary, perhaps we hear it even more sharply today, because we understand again that war is never simply a closed chapter of the past. It is a recurring human catastrophe, and Prokofiev, in this symphony, grasped that with an almost terrifying clarity.
So perhaps the Sixth is less popular than the Fifth because it is less reassuring, less immediately “successful” in the conventional sense. But for me, that is exactly what makes it so great. It does not flatter the listener. It tells the truth—and that truth remains painfully relevant.
Prokofiev evolved slowly as a symphonist. His later symphonies sound very different from earlier ones like the Second or Third Symphonies. How do you view his development?
I think Prokofiev’s development as a symphonist is especially fascinating because each symphony seems to answer the question of what a symphony can be in a different way. He does not follow one single symphonic path from work to work. On the contrary, almost every symphony is built on a new principle, a new relationship to form, material, and genre.
The First Symphony, the “Classical,” is of course a very special case. It was conceived as a kind of dialogue with the 18th century, almost as an imagined Haydn symphony written by a modern composer. But even there, one immediately hears Prokofiev himself: his sharpness, his lightness, his motor rhythm, his unexpected harmonic logic, his irony. So, it is not simply a stylization. It is already a very personal statement. He enters the classical form, but at the same time shows that within that clarity a completely new temperament can exist.
The Second Symphony stands at the opposite pole. If the First is about clarity, proportion, and a kind of Neoclassical wit, the Second is a work of steel and force. It is harsh, concentrated, almost industrial in its energy. Built as a two-movement structure, it reflects Prokofiev’s interest in the modernist language of the 1920s, in severity, compression, and an almost relentless kind of construction. It is perhaps his most radical symphony, where he seems to test the genre to its limits.
The Third Symphony is already deeply connected with the theater, because it grows out of material from The Fiery Angel. And that is very important, because here the symphony becomes a transformed theatrical drama. It is not simply a matter of borrowing themes from the opera. Rather, Prokofiev takes this enormous psychological and dramatic intensity and recasts it into a purely symphonic form. That is why the Third has such a unique power: it carries something feverish, visionary, almost demonic, but all of it is organized as symphonic argument.
The Fourth Symphony is also connected to the stage, but in a different way, since it is related to the ballet The Prodigal Son. If the Third comes out of the dark and obsessive world of The Fiery Angel, the Fourth has more plasticity, more outward clarity, and a more choreographic sense of movement. One feels its balletic source in the shaping of line, gesture, and form. And it is also significant that Prokofiev later returned to it and produced a much larger revised version, almost as if he felt that the original had not yet fully realized the symphonic potential of the material.
The Fifth Symphony marks another stage altogether. Here we have what one might call a great public symphonic statement. It has breadth, scale, and a very strong sense of monumentality. In some ways it is the most immediately “symphonic” in the traditional public sense, with its grandeur and sweep. But even in the Fifth, for all its brilliance, there is always a certain ambiguity beneath the surface—tension, irony, and unease beneath the apparent affirmation.
And it is precisely against this background that the Sixth Symphony seems to me perhaps his first truly complete symphony in the sense of a fully integrated symphonic cycle. I do not mean that the earlier symphonies are less important—on the contrary, several of them are absolute masterpieces. But many of them are linked either to experiment, to theater, or to a very specific formal idea. In the Sixth, Prokofiev seems to reach a different level of synthesis. Here there is a complete organic unity of the cycle, a deep symphonic logic, and the feeling that all the movements belong to one tragic historical and human whole.
For me, the Sixth is the summit precisely because everything comes together there. It has the hardness and constructive power of the Second, the dark psychological intensity of the Third, and the breadth of the Fifth, but all of this is transformed into a new level of maturity. It is not a symphony-experiment, nor a symphony derived from the theater, nor a symphony-manifesto. It is a work in which Prokofiev achieves something like a classical inevitability of symphonic development, where the entire cycle feels like one spiritual and dramatic journey.
And that is why the Sixth makes such an overwhelming impression on me. In it, Prokofiev is no longer simply trying out different symphonic models; he arrives at something wholly integrated and final in the deepest artistic sense. Much as I love the Fifth, the Sixth seems to me his most inspired symphonic revelation—the work in which his tragic sense of history, his prophetic awareness of danger, and his extraordinary mastery of form come together with truly exceptional force.
Could you tell us something of your future plans? Do you have any more recordings in preparation or perhaps some pieces important to you that you would like to record?
Among the many projects I have next season, it is very telling to me that so many of them are connected with Prokofiev. That is not accidental. He is truly one of the central composers in my musical life—a kind of artistic flagship for me—and I feel that I return to him again and again in very different genres.
Next season, I will conduct The Love for Three Oranges in León, and that production will open the season. Then, in Seville, my production of Betrothal in a Monastery—first staged at Theater an der Wien in Vienna and very successfully received—will be revived. In November and December, I am also scheduled to conduct performances of Romeo and Juliet at the Zurich Opera. In addition, I will perform Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante, one of his most demanding and large-scale works, a piece whose symphonic breadth makes it feel almost like a symphony in its own right. And in April 2027, another important Prokofiev project awaits me in Copenhagen: the Violin Concerto with the Copenhagen Phil.
I mention all this not simply to list future engagements, but because Prokofiev truly continues to return to my programs—in opera, ballet, symphonic music, and the concerto repertoire. For me, he is one of those composers who accompanies me especially deeply and who constantly reveals something new.
Some further thoughts…
What feels especially important to me about this album is that it brings together Prokofiev and Silvestrov—two composers from very different eras, with very different musical languages, yet profoundly connected on an inner level.
Prokofiev wrote his Sixth Symphony after the Second World War, at the very moment when the world was struck by Hiroshima and Nagasaki and began, perhaps for the first time, to grasp the reality not simply of war, but of global destruction. This is music in which one feels not only the memory of catastrophe already endured, but also the premonition of an even greater and more terrifying one to come. In that sense, the Sixth Symphony seems to me almost prophetic. It speaks not only about its own time, but about the way history returns human beings again and again to the same tragic questions.
Silvestrov, on the other hand, is our contemporary, a living classic, and a man whose own thought has been directly touched by what is happening today in his native land. There is a very strong and very painful historical rhyme in that. But if on this album Prokofiev gives voice to the premonition of catastrophe, Silvestrov, to me, brings not an answer or a resolution, but a special form of consolation. Not consolation in any naive sense, as if everything could simply be forgotten or too easily overcome, but consolation as an attempt to preserve what is human in the human being—the capacity to hear, to remember, and to feel compassion.
This seems especially important to me today, when we are living through a moment of profound historical rupture, when so many Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian families, friendships, and human bonds have been broken or violently separated. In such a situation, music cannot, of course, repair anything in a literal sense. But it can remind us that, on a deeper level, the human voice, human pain, human memory, and human hope still remain shared.
That is probably why this album matters so much to me. It is not simply a juxtaposition of two great composers. It is an attempt to hear in music both warning and grief, both memory and—despite everything—the possibility of inner reconciliation, compassion, and consolation.