Ustvolskaya’s music is indeed different. It is different, not least, from that of Shostakovich, with whom she studied at the Leningrad Conservatory and had an intense personal and musical relationship that continued after her graduation in 1947. The fact has gone down in history that Shostakovich quoted a theme from one of her earliest compositions, her Trio for violin, clarinet, and piano of 1949, in his Fifth String Quartet (1952) and quoted it again, near the end of his life, in his suite setting poems by Michelangelo. What these quotations signify, though, or what they remember, we cannot know. Nor can we know what Ustvolskaya ultimately felt about Shostakovich. Almost anything is possible. Gratitude. Outgrowing. Reverence. Mystery.

From her twenties to her fifties Ustvolskaya supported herself by teaching at the junior department of the Leningrad Conservatory. Meanwhile, she lived two creative lives. She wrote cantatas, light orchestral pieces, songs, and film scores, all for immediate consumption and all subsequently disavowed. And she wrote the music she wanted to write, almost none of it performed at the time. That 1949 trio had its first performance in 1968. Other works similarly had to wait two decades to be heard, and in the 1960s she virtually gave up writing her “real” music, to start again in the 1970s, when her music was presented more immediately—though still only in the Soviet Union. She was virtually unknown abroad until the early 1990s, when she gained the advocacy of Joel Sachs in the U.S., Reinbert de Leeuw in the Netherlands, and Frank Denyer in England. By that time, however, she had ceased composing.

This is made explicit in most of the works she wrote after 1970, either by a subtitle from the Latin liturgy (in the case of the three pieces of 1970-75 entitled “Composition”) or by a sacred text (in the four symphonies that came later). But Ustvolskaya meant the remark to apply also to her compositions of the late forties and fifties; the spirituality was in the sound. Tonight’s performances, of one earlier work (the Fourth Piano Sonata) and three from later in her life, will show what is exceptional and constant in that sound.

More words, at this point, would lose the track.

Yes, the music speaks with its own huge force, its own stark contrasts, its own almost vacant simplicity. It needs only performers who can project—through its hugeness, its starkness, and its vacancy—the elemental.

Wholly open and yet totally mysterious, retracted to the fundamental and yet vigilant of the cosmos, Ustvolskaya’s work perhaps had to wait until now, for it belongs in the present of composers a generation or two younger—in our present.

GALINA USTVOLSKAYA (1919-2006)
Symphony No.5 “Amen”

Ustvolskaya wrote her First Symphony in 1955, a three-movement piece for full orchestra plus two boys singing a text by the Italian children’s author Gianni Rodari. The other four all came much later and in very different form. Each of them is a prayer, delivered not only by a solo singer or speaker but also by an unusual array of instruments, these being violin, oboe, trumpet, tuba, and wooden cube (struck with mallets) in No.5, which was Ustvolskaya’s last work, composed in 1989-90, before she withdrew into creative silence.

The words are those of the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father”), spoken in Russian by a man who “must recite the text as if he were fervently praying to God!” Ustvolskaya expects intensity, too, from the instrumentalists. The violinist, who keeps repeating the same brief phrase, is asked to play “forcefully, imploringly and espressivo, like a ‘voice from the grave’,” while the others have the simple direction “espressivo” for their more varied but still limited vocabularies of gesture. The cube is an instrument Ustvolskaya had introduced in her Composition No.2.

KLAUS LANG (b.1971)
the whitebearded man. the six frogs.

Klaus Lang is a composer and organist living in Berlin. As program note for this piece, he offers a familiar story: “An old longbearded man was asked how he handles his beard while sleeping. Does it go over or under the blanket? The wise man answered: ‘Somtimes over, sometimes under the cover.’”

Music of stillness, to be played pppp from beginning to end. Music of layers, where the pianist’s left hand begins in the far bass, below the quarter-tone timpani, but peeks out above from the halfway point in this ten-minute composition. Music of waiting and happening, of stasis and movement, all at the limits of hearing, of listening. Music of abrupt change and continuity.

GALINA USTVOLSKAYA
Piano Sonata No.4
Piano Sonata No.6

There is a part for piano in almost everything Ustvolskaya wrote, her Fifth Symphony being an exception. She wrote a concerto for the instrument and six sonatas. But this is not the piano we are used to. Ustvolskaya recreates it as an instrument of declamation, of force, and of extremes—extremes of loudness, of speed, of register. The result is virtuoso music, but completely unshowy. Nothing is grateful here, nothing merely fluent. All is incised meaning.

The Fourth Sonata, of 1957, is in four movements played without a break and lasting altogether for about twelve minutes. The Sixth—written just before the Fifth Symphony, in 1988—is in one seven-minute movement to be played espressivissimo and very loud.

PIERLUIGI BILLONE (b.1960)
Mani. Matta

A pupil of Salvatore Sciarrino and Helmut Lachenmann, Pierluigi Billone teaches at the University for Music and the Performing Arts in Graz, where Klaus Lang is also on the faculty. His new, extraordinarily virtuoso piece for solo percussionist belongs to a sequence of “Mani” (Hands) works he started with Mani. Giacometti for string trio in 2000. This time the implicit homage is to the painter Matta, perhaps on account of his bold hybrids of organic and abstract form, for Billone’s music moves in borderlands between mechanical and corporeal rhythms, and between instrument and body.

The principal instrument is a marimba, and the standard way of interacting with that instrument, by means of mallets, is considerably enlarged and developed. Not only is the player asked to use different kinds of stick, from very hard (at the beginning) to very soft (bass drum sticks), but also the hands are brought into play, as the title intimated, both to strike the resonating bars and to hold them, thereby muting the sound. Moreover, the instrument is adapted. Only its lower three octaves are used, the treble being replaced by wooden percussion instruments of indefinite pitch: two log drums and a woodblock. And the performer is adapted as well, bearing a quite different instrument: a gong. The miniature wave motions of much of the music add up to great tides passing between musician and instrument, between noise and note, between calm and frenzy, in search of a center.

GALINA USTVOLSKAYA
Composition No. 2 “Dies Irae”

Like her four symphonies of 1979-80, the three pieces of 1970-75 to which Ustvolskaya gave the bald title “Composition” are for irregular formations. Each has a central piano part, joined in No.1 by piccolo and tuba, in No.3 by quartets of flutes and bassoons, and in No.2 by eight double basses and a hammered wooden cube. The Latin subtitles suggest links with the Catholic liturgy; “Dies irae” (Day of Wrath) comes from the mass for the dead. But Ustvolskaya does not quote the original chant, instead creating a purely instrumental ceremony of verses and responses, solos and choruses, signals and outbursts.

Composition No.2 is in ten linked sections, nearly all of which are loud or very loud throughout. The indications “profound” and “with inner tension” recur, and almost every gesture is marked “espressivo” or “espressivissimo.” Playing for about twenty minutes, the piece makes mighty claims on the stamina of the performers, who have to be immediately on a high peak and stay there.

“There is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead.”
(Galina Ustvolskaya)

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.