“Idyll,” from Naive Music

• This piece comes from Silvestrov’s piano cycle Naïve Music (composed 1954/5, revised 1993).¹
• Naïve Music is a collection of character pieces in neoclassical style (homage to the short piano works of various 19^th century composers) which Silvestrov wrote in the 1950s and gathered into a cycle in 1993.²
• Idyll is No. 4 in the series. In Silvestrov’s score, it is dated May 1955.³ 

“I understand my own development as a circular process which can be expressed in the inspired lines of TS Eliot: ‘In my end is my beginning, in my beginning is my end’. I began with naïve music and imitated Chopin a little, then went through the avant-garde, but rejected both of these firmly in favour of my ‘metaphorical style’ and have made a return to naïve music.”

Silvestrov, on his compositional development, and his use of the term “naive”⁴

1. Valentin Silvestrov, Klavierwerke Band II (Mainz: M.P. Balaieff, 2010), 39.
2. Tatjana Frumkis, liner notes to Silvestrov: Piano Music, Elisaveta Blumina, Grand Piano GP639, CD, 2013. 
3. Valentin Silvestrov, Klavierwerke Band II (Mainz: M.P. Balaieff, 2010), 58.
4. Quoted in Tatjana Frumkis, liner notes to Silvestrov: Piano Music, Elisaveta Blumina, Grand Piano GP639, CD, 2013.