Sacred Songs is the seventh album ECM has devoted entirely to Valentin Silvestrov, released in 2012, the Ukrainian composer's 75th birthday year. It gathers six sets of a cappella pieces from 2006 to 2008, on words from the Orthodox services and the psalms. They are sung by the Kyiv Chamber Choir under its co-founder Mykola Hobdych. In the booklet Paul Griffiths asks how new music can set such ancient texts without limiting them, and suggests it can do so by sounding "already like a memory".
Silvestrov came to choral writing late, after decades given to the piano, chamber music and the symphony. "The piano, there lies my fate," he has said. According to ECM, Hobdych's persistent encouragement drew him into the choral world and the study of old Russian litanies. The results include Requiem for Larissa (2004) and Sacred Works (2010) on the label. These recordings were made in 2008 in St Michael's Cathedral in Kyiv, part of the Golden-Domed Monastery and rebuilt in recent decades. The album is a co-production of Kyiv Choir Productions and ECM, with Andrew Mokrytsky as engineer, and several singers from the choir take solo lines.
The six sets are Songs for Vespers, Psalms and Prayers, Two Psalms of David, Two Spiritual Refrains, Two Spiritual Songs and Three Spiritual Songs. The opening Come, Let Us Worship moves through slowly shifting harmonies, while Silent Night is hushed and dreamlike, sinking at the end into the low voices. Griffiths hears bells throughout this music, in a culture where bells are themselves voices. The acclamation Many Years returns three times, and the church acoustic becomes almost a partner of the choir.
Dan Morgan of MusicWeb International described the choir as "hugely refined, darkly sonorous and lit from within as if by an ancient light". He regretted only that the booklet prints no sung texts, and summed the album up as "nourishing repertoire, ravishingly sung". Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews singled out Songs for Vespers as the grandest statement on the disc.
CD edition of ECM New Series 2279, first released on 28 September 2012.
