The Kingdom of Silence

Program notes

About the Work

Victoria Borisova-Ollas wrote ‘The Kingdom of Silence’ in 2003, and the title names a place rather than a mood. In her own note on the piece she writes that the mysterious country we all go to after our lifetime has many different names, and that this is one of them. She has said that the words come from a line in Psalm 94, which she translated freely from the Russian Bible. It is one of several orchestral pieces of hers that start from a psalm: ‘Wings of the Wind’ drew on Psalm 104, and ‘Before the Mountains Were Born’ on Psalm 90.

The score is a memorial. It is written in memory of Nikolai Korndorf (1947 to 2001), whom the composer calls an extraordinary personality among his generation of Russian composers. Korndorf taught her at the Moscow Conservatory, and the lexicon of women composers at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater describes him as her instrumentation teacher and a strong influence on her work. He died two years before the piece was written.

The commission came from the Gothenburg Art Sounds festival of 2003 together with Rikskonserter in Sweden, and the piece was first performed that year. European American Music Distributors, in a notice of a later American performance, names the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Peter Eötvös for the premiere. Universal Edition publishes the score and lists it at fifteen minutes, for a large orchestra with three percussionists, harp, and a piano whose player also takes the celesta.

The piece has travelled slowly but steadily since. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra played it under Andrey Boreyko in 2016, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra recorded it under Martyn Brabbins in 2019 for an album of her orchestral music on BIS, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra programmed its first British performance in January 2022 with Karina Canellakis conducting. The Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Concertgebouw both list these June concerts as the Dutch premiere.

Borisova-Ollas does not describe a programme in the narrative sense. She describes a dream: a lullaby, a slow sinking into sleep, a succession of scenes, and the lullaby again. Whether the dream is that of a child, of the person remembered or of the listener is left open, and her note ends on a question: with the return of the lullaby a long chain of events is finished, but does the dream itself ever end?

What to Listen For

The opening is the thing to hold on to, because it comes back. Glockenspiel and celesta play what the composer calls a rather simple melody, a lullaby, and the strings wrap it in an echo. The sound is bright and small, like a musical box in a large room.

From there, in her words, we gradually sink into a dream. The middle of the piece is a chain of separate scenes. Some are joined to their neighbours by a shared tempo, so that one seems to grow out of another. Others are cut off by a sudden change of mood. The reviewer for Arcana, writing about the BIS recording, heard the whole as the journey of a life, moving from stillness through episodes of anguish and of resolve to a serene close.

When the bell sounds of the opening return, the shape closes: a critic quoted on the composer’s website calls it an arc form that begins and ends with subtle playing from the percussion section, with a kind of narrative unfolding in between. Listen to how the lullaby sounds the second time, after everything that has passed, and to how the music stops without quite answering the composer’s question.