Happy 100th, Galina Ustvolskaya!

 

 

Today, June 17 of 2019, marks the 100th anniversary of one of the great musical artists of the 20th Century, Galina Ustvolskaya.

She is a composer near to my heart. When I was offered a 2-hour radio show 3.5 years ago, I decided on a classical format mainly because I thought the station needed a classical show. I didn’t know enough names to fill the the first 2-hour show. And so it was (I truly believe) providence that I came across the 6th piano sonata by Galina Ustvolskaya via a Youtube sidebar recommendation. I’d of course never heard of her and the name wasn’t in the reference books I had at the time (although she’s mentioned once in Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise .) It is like music I love in other genres – unmistakably the work of an outsider who could not give a f*ck what anyone thinks, and most importantly, an assault from the first moment of its existence, it’s parallel universe music. At least, the work that survives her.

For a long time, I took her small body of work – there are 25 works on her approved opus list – as further proof of her otherness. In fact, Ustvolskaya wrote drek, just as greats like Shostakovich, Alfred Schnittke and Miecszylaw Weinberg cranked out drek. It was required of working Soviet composers. Unfortunately for those guys, their drek lingers on in their catalogue. It’s still out there and still being recorded by well-intentioned musicians. Ustvolskaya, on the other hand, simply disowned her drek, refusing to acknowledge it in her catalogue, and so her drek simply evaporated into the ether.

Otherwise, like her peers in the Soviet orbit, her great early work in the ’40s and ’50s went straight to the desk drawer, where it would be safe from the prying ears of Soviet music censors until (conceivably) more enlightened times returned.

I’ve only heard one disowned “Social Realist”-friendly work of Ustvolskaya’s, a 10-minute “Children’s Suite”. It is definitely worth hearing but overall pretty “meh”. Imagine if Franz Kafka had written a children’s book and you’ll have an idea of it.

Like most important Soviet composers of her time, Ustvolskaya is linked in many people’s minds to Shostakovich. From 1937 to ’47, Ustvolskaya was Shostakovich’s student at the Leningrad Conservatory, and for eight years after that, until Shostakovich’s second marriage, they were peers: at one point Shostakovich called her his “musical conscience” and sent her his works to critique before he submitted them to his publisher.

Like a lot of people, Ustvolskaya probably lived too long, and in the end her bitterness at being forever linked to Shostakovich seems to have gotten the better of her. In her old age and long after she ceased composing, she dismissed both the man and his music in deeply disparaging terms. Shostakovich, who died in 1975, could not respond to her allegations, which amounted to, I suppose, a soft form of psychological battery, in her telling.  The fact remains the two were close associates for 18 years. Thanks to the nature of Soviet life under Stalin – people were disinclined to write memoirs, let’s say – scholars are left to parse a few quotes or lines from letters. It is generally accepted that Shostakovich proposed marriage to Ustvolskaya at one point (and possibly twice) and that she rejected him; others contend Shostakovich dumped her when he married his second wife in ’55. Either way, it is likely their split was acrimonious, as it is likely that acrimony colored her late-life reflections.

Her frustration with the Shostakovich association is understandable, nevertheless. While constant references to Shostakovich are annoying and lazy in regard to Soviet composers like Mieczslaw Weinberg, in the case of Ustvolskaya such references are almost entirely off base. Dismissing Ustvolskaya as a Shostakovich “student” tells more about how the laziness of the writer: it is comparable to calling Thelonious Monk a Duke Ellington clone. No. Her mature work, from the 1950s up to her 5th symphony of 1990, bears no resemblance to Shostakovich.* I suspect, as with Weinberg’s, her musical relationship with Shostakovich was a lot more 2-way than many presumed.  Shostakovich in fact wrote of her influence on his work, while acknowledging she took none from him. There’s a theme in her early “Trio for clarinet, violin and piano” (1949) that Shostakovich famously (in a manner of speaking) quotes in several pieces (his 5th string quartet and the Michelangelo song set). But I think Shostakovich fans might recognize Ustvolskaya’s tone – a bleakness in which lightness is swallowed whole – as well as a couple techniques (the pleading, single-note violin bleat, for one) in his works in the ’60s and ’70s.** I think it’s safe to say Shostakovich is or will be regarded as his century’s greatest composer; that doesn’t mean he invented everything out of empty space. Which is to say he would of course be influenced by geniuses like Ustvolskaya and Weinberg.

Ustolskaya’s surviving music is immediately identifiable as her own and stymies comparison, in the way Gloria Coates’ and other outsiders’ music is. You might not LIKE it (and it’s worth a glance at the comments beneath several of her Youtube vids), and even diehard fans (I’m the only one I know) will concede two hours of Ustvolskaya’s music is a LOT, but you can’t doubt its sincerity. In Ustvolskaya’s case, the music is often forceful – punishing, sometimes – and terse; moments of delicate beauty are not infrequent, though they tend to be subsumed by blunt blows to the back of the skull, metaphorically speaking.

These days if you want to hear Ustvolskaya’s music, you have to go to Youtube as often as not; very little of it is available legitimately. (Much of this mixtape is cribbed from YouTube.) A series of Megadisc CDs issued in the ’90s, featuring Oleg Malov and St. Petersburg musicians in U-sanctioned (and so, definitive) performances, is out of print. Reinbert de Leeuw and the Schonberg Ensemble recorded a smattering of stuff in the ’90s that is likewise out of print. In this decade, Patricia Kopatchinskaya has championed Ustvolskaya’s violin music in concert (she curated a California festival last year that amounted to an Ustvolskayfest) and on an essential 2014 set for ECM New Series, with Markus Hinterhäuser and Reto Bieri. And Natalia Andreeva recorded all of the works for solo piano in a similarly essential set for the Grand Piano label from 2015.

But unless Google is messing with me, NO recordings of her five symphonies are in print today. And aside from the recordings made by the artists listed in the previous paragraph, there are very few pieces that have been recorded more than once by anyone. The fact that not a single orchestra or label has embarked on an effort to present hi-fi accounts of her wee redacted oeuvre is, on the one hand, astonishing – given the undeniable genius it represents – and on the other, perhaps, telling, given its overall uncompromising nature and, in the symphonies, its sometimes frightening existential Christianity. Still… it seems like a logical move for some bold-ish record label. BIS? C’mon now! I think all five symphonies would fit on a single CD…

Finally, there are a couple great websites for information on Ustvolskaya, her work and extant recordings. One site is called Music Under Soviet Rule, maintained by the University of Southern Illonois at Edwardsville (!) (http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/musov.html (also with outstanding entries on Shostakovich and the controversy surrounding his memoirs as well as onVainberg/Weinberg, Prokofiev and Kancheli.) The other site is Ustvolskaya.org. It has correpondence, photographs, manuscripts, and her approved compostion list. Most of what I’ve written here, fact-wise, is culled from those sites. Both sites have excellent bios in the 1000-word range.

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* It is true that the Op. 1 in her redacted opi list, the 1946 piano concerto she wrote as a graduation project begins with so Shostakovich-y a theme I always forget it’s her when it pops up unexpectedly in an iTunes shuffle; but even then, by the third of its four movements the writing is stark and driven by a thick, pounding rhythm, clearly pointing to where she would go. It could be regarded as a manifesto, in a sense, whether that was her intention at the time or not. (I suspect she did.)

** Listen to the 12th (second movement) and 13th string quartets and see what you think…

0:00:05
Grand Duet for Cello and Piano (1958), pt. 1
  Mstislav Rostropovich (c) w/ Alexei Lubimov (p)
        (EMI)

0:03:33
Symphony No. 1 for orchestra and 2 boys’ voices (1955) (excerpt)
  Dmitri Liss: Ural Philharmonic Orchestra
        (Megadisc)

0:06:17
Piano Sonata No. 1 (1947); IV
  Natalia Andreeva
        (Grand Piano, 2015)

0:09:56
Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano (1949), movements II and III
  Patricia Kopajinkskaya (v), Markus Hinterhäuser (p) & Reito Bieri (cl)
        (ECM New Series, 2014)

0:18:48
Octet for 2 oboes, 4 violins, timpani and percussion (1949-50), 3rd movement
  Reinbert de Leeuw: Schonberg Ensemble
        (hatART)

21:30
Grand Duet, pt. 2

0:24:07
Symphony No. 1 (excerpt)

25:50
Composition No. 1 (part 1) for piccolo, tuba and piano (1971)
  Oleg Malov: The St. Petersburg Soloists
        (Megadisc)

32:45
Sonata for violin and piano (1952)
  Patricia Kopatchinskaya & Markus Hinterhäuser

41:25
Octet for 2 oboes, 4 violins, timpani, and piano, movements 4 & 5

46:18
Grand Duet, pt. 3

49:21
Symphony No. 1 (excerpt)

50:40
Symphony No. 3 “Jesus Messiah, Save Us!” for reciter and small orchestra (1983)Text by Hermannus Contractus
  Alexei Petrenko (reciter) w/ Munich Philharmonic conducted by Valery Gergiev.
BBC Proms, 08.22.2016

1:06:02
Composition No. 2, “Dies Irae” for eight double basses, piano and cube (1972—1973), pt. 2

1:09:25
Grand Duet, pt. 4

1:11:15
Piano Sonata No. 6 (1988)
  Oleg Malov

1:19:09
Symphony No. 5 “Amen” for reciter (man), violin, oboe, trumpet, tuba and wooden cube (1989—90)
  Dmitri Liss w/ the St. Petersburg Soloists
(Megadisc)

1:33:08
Grand Duet, pt. 5