After decades of neglect, the stern and unbending music of Galina Ustvolskaya has been winning new friends at such a rate that the piano sonatas have now been recorded several times over. In the context of Soviet musical life, the Sixth in particular is a work of astonishing radicalism, the composer’s language imploding on itself (like the regime) to leave little more than a gestural reiteration of tone-clusters. As we slowly become acclimatized to the deafening dynamic level, the effect is rather like listening to Morton Feldman in reverse and, as Frank Denyer suggests in his own notes for his Conifer CD, a sense of structure does begin to emerge.
Earlier works in the series are salutary reminders that Ustvolskaya’s career began in relatively conventional fashion, although the composer and/or her minders have been assiduous in suppressing the socialist realist cantatas and occasional pieces that peppered her output until the 1960s. The first three sonatas combine the experimental impulses of early Bartok with a rhythmically denatured version of Shostakovich’s Bach-with-pockmarks piano style. Already there is a curious, non-Western sense of stasis, which, given the composer’s obsession with spiritual contemplation might suggest a certain fellowship with Messiaen (most plausibly in the Fourth Sonata) were it not for the extreme asceticism of her vision. Alex Ross’s notes for the rival integrale of Marianne Schroeder prefer to cite the Rosicrucian Satie, but I’m not sure how helpful this is. It didn’t help me. Not that Ustvolskaya is ever easy to ‘place’. Her deliberately monotonous rhythms sometimes recall late Stravinsky, yet predate them, while the brevity and bleakness of her melodic ideas pertain to what is actually a subsequent stage in Shostakovich’s development. The precise nature of their liaison need not detain us here but it seems that the musical influences went both ways.
Composed after a gap of nearly 30 years, the Fifth Sonata is obviously the work of the same composer. That said, its ten-movement structure represents a decisive break with the past and Ustvolskaya now places her Shostakovich-like utterances back-to-back with ‘experimental’ dissonances more likely to appeal to enthusiasts of Giacinto Scelsi or the hard minimalism of Louis Andriessen. Hence in part the sudden vogue for her music.
Of the two pianists under discussion, Marianne Schroeder has the surer technique and the superior instrument. Even if her very fluency tends to rob the music of its harsher qualities, only the final sonata is overcivilized to the point of misrepresentation. With Denyer, the Sixth makes a devastating impact at a markedly slower tempo. Alas, I had the impression that the work might have been recorded first, wreaking havoc on the piano’s tuning: the skeletal polyphony of the earlier pieces suffers quite badly. Nor is Conifer’s studio sound as appropriately ‘ritualistic’ as Hat-Hut’s church acoustic. In terms of presentation, Conifer score heavily by providing one track per movement. Hat-Hut do provide index points for the individual movements, so why is there nothing in the packaging to tell you where you are?
A final word of warning. Integrity does not confer talent. And however ‘honest’ this music may or may not be, I haven’t found it all that easy to listen to. It may be that we need a recording of the First Symphony to ‘humanize’ the rather one-sided image the composer has sought to promote. For the moment it is hard not to sympathize with the reactions of Roy Harris on hearing the Ustvolskaya Violin Sonata, once routinely paraded to visiting Westerners as an ‘official’ example of Soviet modernism. He found it “dissonant from beginning to end” and “kind of ugly”. If pressed to make a choice between the discs under review I would opt for Marianne Schroeder’s.'