Uploaded December 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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1. Georgs Pelēcis - New Year’s Music (Arr. for Piano Solo) 00:00
2. Coversart - Sasha's Drawings 13:35
3. Pavel Karmanov - Past Perfect 16:15
4. Vladimir Martynov - The Beatitudes (Arr. for Piano Solo) 36:43
5. Valentin Silvestrov - Nostalghia 41:43
6. Arvo Pärt - Für Alina 47:31
7. J. S. Bach - Prelude in B minor, BWV 855a Arr. by Alexander Siloti 51:48

1. New Year’s Music (1977/1996) by Georgs Pelēcis (b. 1947)
Georgs Pelēcis won a large following of fans with New Year’s Music, which exists in versions for brass band and for piano. In it, the fragrance of ancient madrigals meets elements of rock music. This music addressed its contemporaries directly, on the street, hip-to-hip and lip-to-lip, bypassing the stiffness of concert halls. Or, stated more intelligently, Georgs was one of the first here to accept the minimalism (ritualism) and New Consonant Music paradigm.
Note from the publisher: "Long piano song. We may think to the present, in his whole duration, to Latvia, and maybe also to Keith Jarreth."

2. Sasha's Drawings (2022) by Coversart
This composition was inspired by drawings of Sasha Anisimova (Ukrainian graphic designer and illustrator based in Kharkiv)
You can read Sasha's story here: https://vogue.ua/article/vogueuainenglish/lost-life-artist-sasha-anisimova-on-her-kharkiv-drawings.html (her interview with Vogue magazine) Follow Sasha's Instagram: instagram.com/sasanisimova


3. Past Perfect (2014) by Pavel Karmanov (b. 1970)
The mood and character of this piece remind me of a typical restless night with a series of nightmares. But that's what the composer himself writes about his work: "I have been writing this piece for 9 months, an unusually long time for me, and can be said to have been struggling in agony, constantly rejecting the composed material. It is music about something to forget forever. The piece was written in a difficult time for me and life circumstances led to its sad mood."

4. The Beatitudes (1998) by Vladimir Martynov (b. 1946)
"The Beatitudes" is a choral work written by Vladimir Martynov in 1998. And the composer arranged it for the Kronos Quartet and the Kronos played in their "Awakening” concert in San Francisco on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11terrorist attacks (2006) and later in New York for the 10th anniversary (2011). Combining American minimalism and Russian Orthodox chant, it is a poignant meditation on the eight Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12).

5. Nostalghia (2001) by Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937)
The music of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov is a unique and delicate tapestry of dramatic and emotional textures that freely alludes to the entire history of music. Beginning his creative career in the radical Soviet avant-garde, Silvestrov demonstrated an almost painful sensitivity to the intimacy that music can create between performer and listener. He would later refute his modernist roots, saying "the most important lesson of the avant-garde is to be free of all conceived ideas, particularly those of the avant-garde," and began composing a series of works entitled Postludium that initiated the elegiac, poetic, and highly personal relationship with silence which has come to characterize his most recent music.

The Brazilians call it saudade. It's an elusive, almost intoxicating mix of emotions suffused with longing, loss and memory, best evoked in music. Perhaps Ukrainians have their own word for it. But if not, it can surely be heard in Valentin Silvestrov's Nostalghia, a solo piano work from 2001 that may just leave you a little lightheaded and yearning for something inexplicable.

Nostalghia is music stripped bare. The fragments of melody, interrupted by profound stillness, float like hazy memories. Half-recalled scales, beautiful in their childlike impairment, recall Brian Eno's Music for Airports. But Silvestrov has calculated every nuance. The lingering mist is achieved by painstaking instructions in pedaling.

6. Für Alina (1976) is a work for piano composed by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). It's considered to be an essential work of his tintinnabuli style.

Für Alina was dedicated to a family friend's eighteen-year-old daughter. The family had broken up and the daughter went to England with her father. The work, dedicated to the daughter, was actually meant as a work of consolation for the girl's mother, missing her child. Its introspection calls to mind a vivid image of youth, off to explore the world.

7. The Prelude in B minor (J. S. Bach, arranged Siloti) is a transcription for piano by Alexander Siloti of the Prelude in E minor BWV 855a by Johann Sebastian Bach from his Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.


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