Valentin Vasylyovych Silvestrov, born on September 30, 1937, in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union, is a Ukrainian composer and pianist. He began private music lessons at age fifteen, attended the Kyiv Evening Music School from 1955 to 1958, and entered the Kyiv Conservatory in 1958, where he studied musical composition under Borys Lyatoshynsky. His early compositions, including Symphony No. 1 (1963), reflected avant-garde twelve-tone techniques and met with disapproval from Soviet cultural authorities, which led to his exclusion from the Union of Composers of the USSR in 1970. Following a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in 1967, his Symphony No. 3 “Eschatophonie” premiered at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1968, representing his first major international exposure. During the 1970s, he transitioned to a postmodern, neoclassical style that he described as metaphorical music. His compositions from this period include Kitsch-Music (1977), Postludium (1984), Metamusic (1992), and Requiem for Larissa (1999). He received the Shevchenko National Prize in 1995, and in October 2011, he received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In March 2022, he fled to Berlin due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and was awarded the International Shostakovich Prize in July 2022 and the Opus Klassik for lifetime achievement in October 2022.
