Silvestrov: Requiem for Larissa

Valentin Silvestrov wrote his "Requiem for Larissa" in response to the unexpected death of his wife, the musicologist and literary scholar Larissa Bondarenko. The arguably most famous Ukrainian composer did not set a drama of the Last Judgment to music, but rather a very personal lament in sheer endless, world-lost repetitions. Although he set the text of the Latin Requiem, he did not compose a mass, nor any liturgically bound or church-compatible music. The theological order of the Catholic funeral mass is irrevocably dissolved in his seven-movement requiem. As if religious gravitation had been suspended, isolated words drift freely and lost, in and out of one another.