Catalogue Connection: 25130

The piano sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya have attracted a surprising number of pianists to the recording studios. Here, Divine Art presents the 11th part of its Russian Piano Music series and offers a breath-taking twofer. “Breath-taking” is for the breadth of insight Natalia Andreeva brings to these scores. Andreeva even pens her own booklet notes, which are a model of their kind: musical, learned, even scholarly. A page of 35 references attests to Andreeva’s activities as “researcher” (a label quoted from her biography) as well as pianist.

What is important to realize about the music of Galina Ustvolskaya is its utterly uncompromising quality. Ustvolskaya did not like to be compared to other composers, but a period of study with Shostakovich necessarily means the listener will hold out for a snippet of that composer. Seek, and you shall find, inevitably. But Ustvolskaya has a voice all of her own. There is a Webernian concision to her expressive means; nothing is wasted, nothing is frivolous. She prefers dynamic extremes (ffffff and ppppp both appear in her scores), cluster notation, and her music has the ability to flow, notationally freed from bar lines.

The sonatas span the period 1947 to 1988, with No. 1–4 composed between 1947 and 1957; the remaining two date from much later (1986 and 1988). The first was premiered in 1952 by Oleg Malov; I mention this as Malov himself has recorded these works. Malov’s recordings, on Megadisc, do not presently appear on ArkivMusic, so I assume they are unavailable or at the very least tricky to trace; they are, however, reviewed in the Fanfare Archive (Mike Silverton’s review appeared in Fanfare 19:1, in 1995).

While Ustvolskaya frequently eludes any easy categorization or comparison with other composers, her music remains somehow immediately Russian. Perhaps it is the darkness at its core, its forbidding Mussorgskian cragginess. While Andreeva states that her interpretation of the First Sonata is “full of positive, optimistic energy,” where others have seen this piece as “one of melancholy, dark prophecy and presentiment,” the music seems to the present writer to speak of the latter, certainly in its slow second movement; in fairness, the slowly rocking fourth and final movement offers chinks of light and even hints at redemption. Ice on granite catching the Russian winter sunlight, should one wish to wax poetic.

The Second Sonata’s forbidding opening becomes even more so as time passes. The harmonies are fascinating, a sort of Scriabin but one that is more bound to our planet, less to the etheric. Moments where the music threatens to set up some sort of rhythmic regularity tend to end up as cul-de-sacs; similarly, imitation can end almost before it begins, leaving us with hints of avenues that will never be fully explored.

Andreeva states she wants her interpretation of the Third Sonata to be “full of pathos,” and her understanding of Ustvolskaya’s sound world ensures her reading is completely convincing. The distancing effect of lines performed with absolutely equal attack on each note is really quite disconcerting; particularly where there is no easy endpoint of repose to find solace in. Such a way was not Ustvolksaya’s.

It is difficult to believe that the Fourth Sonata was originally published under the title “Sonatina.” This is not Ustvolskaya-lite: Far from it, and perhaps the composer’s “correction” of the title to fully-fledged “Sonata” reflects this. There is magic in the first movement’s registral extremes and slowly shifting sound shapes (probably the best way to describe them; or perhaps “sound shadows” is even closer?). There is magic, particularly, in Andreeva’s hushed, almost reverent delivery. The trills of the finale seem to be extracted from late Beethoven in their independent, buzzing energy, and in fact it might not be too ridiculous to suggest that Ustvolskaya inhabits something of the same sometimes rarefied, sometimes angry world of that composer.

The Fifth Sonata marks Ustvolskaya’s return to the piano sonata after some 30 years. Cast in 10 sections, Sonata No. 5 contains passages of such purity they seem to imply a distillation of the very essence of sound itself. Andreeva finds massive loneliness in the sections that pit, at very low dynamic level, the extreme upper register of the piano against its lowest extremes. Interestingly, she finds elements of carillon in the piece (referring this to the bells in St. Petersburg, Ustvolskaya’s home city), citing the mode of attack she uses to imitate these; the result, augmented by a splendidly intelligent use of the pedal, is spellbinding. Here, whisperings seek to speak directly to the soul; but of what? This might easily be music of the Abyss (the desolate penultimate section especially).

The deep, chthonic opening to the Sixth Sonata reminds us how Ustvolskaya’s music can speak to the listener in the most physical of ways as well as the most spiritual. Nowhere, interestingly, does Andreeva merely pound the piano, and the music gains immeasurably in expressivity.
The 1953 Preludes, heard first in the playing order, include the quizzical and the cryptic as modes of utterance. Perhaps they link in some ways to Shostakovich’s op. 11 Preludes in their ability to hint at enormous worlds in brief spaces of time. The driving energy of Ustvolskaya’s No. 5, with its bell-like gesture pitted right next to glassy stasis, even hints at more than one world, all within 90 seconds. Andreeva plays the quieter preludes as if she is handling a holy object, and it is this sense of wonder that projects a very particular feeling of interiorization.

Listening straight through to 90 minutes of Ustvolskaya is a harrowing, yet curiously uplifting, experience. Strongly recommended as a reminder of the sheer power music can wield.

These are Ustvolskaya’s complete works for solo piano. Her music is completely original, yet quintessentially Russian, filled with abstracted folk-like fragments, distant echoes of chant (she was profoundly religious), distant austerity, and intimate intimations of prayer. Gongs, carillon, and church bells seem always in the vicinity. Dissonance, filled with mystery, is omnipresent. Harmony is often built with clusters, which are often distant and quiet. Rhythm is mostly regular, counterpoint is often in just two parts. Lines are generally meandering into unseen territories. Tone is consistently melancholy. The pieces have a variable number of movements, including two of single movements and one (Sonata 5) with 10. The 1953 Preludes are included.

Although these works are concise, this enigmatic music is not for the uncommitted listener or performer. Sonatas 1-4 date from 1947-1957; the final two were written nearly 30 years later (1986-8). There’s nothing quite like these. They have been recorded before: check indexes.

Ms Andreeva is most impressive. This is astonishing music (Shostakovich thought so as well). A welcome release.

Although her music was “composed for the desk drawer” and opposed by Soviet music officialdom, Galina Ustvolskaya was a significant figure even when the concert public barely knew of her. She had a unique spiritual connection with her main composition teacher, Shostakovich. In a letter to her he says, remarkably, “It is not you who are influenced by me; rather, it is I who am influenced by you.” The proof lay in his use of material from Ustvolskaya in his String Quartet No. 5. Behind the imposed silence, she composed her music in a narrow, rigorous, intense style that, for all its constrictions, still speaks Russian. In this excellent recording by one of her most devoted admirers, pianist Natalia Andreeva notes that the first challenge for a performer of Ustvolskaya’s idiom is to find an overall conception of each piece. Andreeva explains that she drew from three sources for her interpretations: Russian folklore, the “black hole of Leningrad’s human suffering,” and religion.

Recognition and publication came late to Ustvolskaya, who was born in 1919, two years after the October Revolution, and wrote her last works, including the Piano Sonata No. 6 (1988) and Symphony No. 5 (1989-90) as the Soviet era came crashing down. She died in 2006, leaving behind around two dozen works, and because the piano was central to most of them, this ear-opening new release gives a deep impression of her musical personality. All of her symphonies include a solo voice, and I’ve seen the last two subtitled “Prayer” and “Amen.” But unlike Gubaidulina, Ustvolskaya wasn’t a practicing Christian, and her chief use of religion musically was in chorales and tone clusters that resemble St. Petersburg’s church bells sounding simultaneously —she was reclusive and spent her entire life almost exclusively in her birthplace of St. Petersburg.

How to describe this highly unusual piano music, which was fully formed according to a unique personal system by the time of Sonata No. 1 in 1947? The most commonly applied adjective is “ex­treme” or even “shocking,” because of dynamic markings that range from pppp to fffff —both appear in Sonata No. 6, a one-movement work lasting just under seven minutes that is largely a mass of tone clusters and pedal points. There is extremism also in Sonata No. 5, where the fifth of 10 movements contains a series of 140 tone clusters played in a continuum at a dynamic range from fff to fffff. The composer offered a specific technique for playing these tone clusters with the knuckles. But as the illuminating program booklet notes, it’s peculiar that Ustvolskaya marked all of her piano sonatas to be played expressively. The notes are almost like runes in a private mystical language. Here is where the “magic elixir” that one critic describes either weaves its spell or doesn’t.

Despite her rigorous, constricted technique and the limitation of many passages to a single line, Ustvolskaya came from a spiritual place. “My work routine is considerably different from that of other composers. I write when I get into a state of grace. Afterwards, the work is left to rest for a while, and when its time has come, I will release it. When it’s time doesn’t come, I destroy it,” she once commented. Being forced as an outsider to wait three decades sometimes between composition and premiere wasn’t entirely an imposition, then. She disliked saying anything about her music but insisted, with vigor, that it bore comparison to no other composer, living or dead. The claim seems credible as you listen to Andreeva’s skilled and totally committed readings —she began her personal “Ustvolskaya project” with performances in Chicago as a Fulbright scholar in 2006 and completed it by making these recordings in 2012.

Andreeva holds a doctorate in music, and her program notes are sympathetically thought through: We are drawn lucidly into an output for the piano that can sound like one continuous piece —as some commentators call it—or more plausibly as the evolution of an original artist who rigorously controlled the process of change. Although not tonal, the six sonatas have a natural form of communication, and even though the 12 Preludes are also not organized by keys or any similar ground plan, Ustvolskaya is intuitively emotional. The closest parallel may be a literary one, to Samuel Beckett in his mature phase, where individual words and phrases, with meaningful silences and an absence of narrative, seem almost absurdly pared away, and yet which give the authentic impression of being literature.

This is Vol. 11 in Divine Art’s series devoted to Russian piano music. The recorded sound and the instrument that Andreeva plays in the former Melodiya studio in St. Petersburg are both fine. Personally, I found it liberating to listen to this release; it added a dimension to Soviet music culture that I barely suspected, besides introducing one of the most intriguing Modernist imaginations one could ever imagine surviving under such hostile conditions.

A modern Russian composer not familiar to me is happily spotlighted on the two-CD set Russian Piano Music Series, Volume 11, Galina Ustvolskaya (Divine Art 25130). Ms. Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) wrote a set of 12 Preludes (1953) and Six Piano Sonatas (1947-1988) over the course of her life. Pianist Natalia Andreeva gives us finely honed, expressively thoroughgoing renditions of these, which comprise Galina’s complete output for solo piano.

The liner notes reflect on her life, calling her “one of the most mysterious figures in the post Prokofiev-Shostakovich era of Russian music.” She is not well known even in Russia. She was a pupil of Shostakovich and spent her life in relative isolation in St. Petersburg. She visited Europe only in the 1990s where her music was performed in several music festivals. Her publisher catalogs some 25 works in all.

There have been some several CDs of her music in later years, two books and such. She believed in working deliberately and carefully over her music, which explains the somewhat modest complete catalog. Her music has no bar lines, is written in 1/8 or 1/4 time, favors clusters on occasion, puts great emphasis on accents and dynamics, which can range from fffff to ppppp , uses unconventional playing techniques at times, like playing with the knuckles, and has a starkly dark style that is not tonal in any simple way, and oftimes is thoroughly atonal. Her later sonatas have been performed with a ferocity that caused some to dub her the “lady with the hammer.” Galina was not always happy with some of these performances. Natalia Andreeva consciously set about learning the piano works in great detail and with an emphasis on musicality per se. She conveys to us the picture of a composer of acute demeanor, a school of one if you like.

And so we get a progression from the preludes and through to the sonatas with Andreeva convincingly tempering the starkness and dramatic dynamic contrasts to a poetically musicianly pianism that tends less toward a savage, harsh sort of interpretation of the music to something highly evocative in all its stark despair.

The music as a result sings fully though characteristically brusque and arctic at times. No one can make of a two-part fugal counterpoint such an icy prospect as can Ustvolskaya. She is very much an expressionist I would say, with the kind of black and white primalness of a classic expressionist woodcut.

It is beautiful music, totally without concessions, extraordinarily original, turgid, high modern without respite. That means you must put yourself squarely into her world to appreciate her the more deeply. And if you do that repeatedly there is magic. Ustvolskaya, based on this recording, is a discovery of great magnitude. I salute Ms. Andreeva and those at Divine Art for making this music so vibrantly available to us.

It leads me to an urgent need to hear her orchestral music and/or everything else she wrote. That’s how it affects me. If you like discoveries in the high modernist realm, Galina Ustvolskaya and this set of the piano music is a highly important one, something that will surely give you another way of hearing musical modernity.

Bravo! Terrific!

I cannot claim any prior familiarity with the music of Galina Ustvolskaya. I am aware of her reputation as one of the most significant Russian composers of the second half of the 20th century, and that she was a student of Shostakovich, who had the highest regard for her and in fact fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. She, however, not only declined that honor but ultimately rejected both the man and his music entirely. Her output was very limited, consisting of only 25 works according to her official catalog, and she apparently wrote nothing in the last 16 years of her life, or at least nothing she published. This set includes everything she wrote for solo piano and is divided between early works (the Preludes and the first four sonatas, composed 1947-57) and those from her later period (the last two sonatas, composed 1986-88).

From the works in this set, and those on the one other Ustvolskaya recording I have in my pos­session, certain features of her idiom emerge clearly. She writes for traditional musical instruments, in the case of the program under review for a normal piano, played by striking the keys. Her textures vary from the barest and most attenuated to very dense tone clusters. She composes in small units, avoiding extended development —except for the two one-movement sonatas, Nos. 3 and 6, only one movement in the piano works lasts as long as five minutes, and most are less than half that. Her writing is characterized by insistent, regular rhythm and very wide dynamic contrasts. She has a liking for repeated figures and bass ostinatos.

Ustvolskaya, it is reported, refused to explain her music and didn’t want it analyzed. She did accept her friend and confidant Viktor Suslin’s description of her as “a voice from the Black Hole of Leningrad.” As one who spent a considerable amount of time in that magnificent city (now again known under its original name, St. Petersburg) in 1974-75 and 1981-82,1 would hardly be inclined to characterize it in that manner, but the reference here is presumably to the awful suffering of the population during the three-year German siege in World War II, as well as the especially harsh impact of Stalinist terror on the city. Shostakovich, too, was influenced by this experience, but his style is much more overtly emotional. Ustvolskaya’s music seems to me more abstract, objective, and remote, although offering interesting, evocative, and sometimes alarming sonic landscapes.

There is much of interest to be heard in the 12 Preludes of 1953, which open the program on this set. No. 1 is very austere and quiescent, and is followed by the kinetic and threatening No. 2. Nos. 3 and 10 seem rather Impressionistic, while Nos. 4 and 5 offer a contrapuntal texture. No. 7 has a narrative quality, appearing to be telling a story. The Sonata No. 1 of 1947 is one of Ustvolskaya’s earliest acknowledged compositions and is a bit more conservative in style than the rest of the program but is nonetheless an intriguing work, with vivid, sometimes Impressionistic textures and much harmonic interest. The second and final movement of the 1949 Sonata No. 2, written during Stalin’s terrifying last years, has a relentlessness and regimentation that becomes very menacing. The one-movement Sonata No. 3 (1952) is at 16 minutes by far the most extended segment of continuous music on the program, but is sectionalized by repeated tempo changes and contains much variety.

Although this is hardly Rachmaninoff, I also sense more in the way of emotional expression in this piece than in the earlier sonatas or the Preludes, an impression perhaps enhanced by Natalia Andreeva’s urgent pacing. Sonata No. 4, from 1957, seems more spontaneous and less constrained than its predecessors in expression of feeling, with a first movement that suggests weeping and a second that alternates between anger and gloom. The much later Sonata No. 5 is in 10 brief movements, many of which have arresting features: for example, the two hands playing at the far ends of the keyboard, alternating with passages that are almost lyrical in the second movement; the massive tone clusters of the third, fifth, and eighth movements; the left-hand clusters alternating with a single right-hand note in the fourth movement; the ghostliness of the seventh movement; and the hypnotic spell cast by the ninth movement. In the one-movement Sonata No. 6, Ustvolskaya places her own stamp on a favorite device of earlier Russian composers, the imitation of bells.

As I have said, this music is new to me, and I have nothing with which to compare Andreeva’s performances —there are several other recordings of this repertoire, but I haven’t heard any of them. I can detect no shortcomings, however, in Andreeva’s interpretations. Her playing is technically proficient, and she is scrupulous in matters of weighting and dynamics. I never had a sense that her chosen tempo was anything other than completely appropriate for the material at hand. She contributed the detailed program note in the accompanying booklet, and it is clear that she is strongly committed to this music.

The sound of this recording is spacious, vivid, and clear. Close miking probably accounts for a bit of ringing on the piano tone as well as occasionally audible action noise, neither of which are obtrusive.

This release has persuaded me that Galina Ustvolskaya is a very interesting composer, one whose music is well worth exploring, and I recommend it.

Before glasnost, the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) was hardly known in the West, but from the 1990s her works have had a raised profile at new music festivals and recordings.

Excluding social-realist pieces like the cantata “Dawn of the homeland” and the symphonic poem “Young Pioneers” from the early 1950s, her oeuvre contains around 21 composition of a personal expressive nature. Among her most prominent works are the dark clarinet trio (cited by her teacher Shostakovich in his fifth string quartet) and octet, and six piano sonatas. She also wrote five symphonies.

She has been called ” The lady with the hammer” and you think, for example, of the hard striking tambourine in the octet and piano concert. The Hammer Effect can also occur in the clusters in the Piano Sonata No. 5 with an insensitive interpreter. They are to be performed with the left hand’s knuckles in a dynamic range from fff to fffff . But Natalia Andreeva gives them more spiritual than acoustical weight. She took the sound of the clock bells in St. Peter and St. Paul Cathedral, close to Ustvolskaya’s home in St. Petersburg, as a reference point in both the 5 th and 6th Sonatas.

“The lady with the hammer” barely speaks at all at Andreeva. In the second piano sonata she instead portays Ustvolskaya in an environment of prayer and prophecy. It is understatement and melancholy that characterizes the interpretation. The Twelve Preludes from 1953 do not follow the ‘circle of fifths’, they are atonal small pieces in which from time to time rays of sun shine through. As with the Sonatas, the interpretation and playing is consistently insightful.

This double CD of piano music is for people who like a touch of bleakness to their listening. Galina Ustvolskaya was a shy and introspective composer known, according to the sleeve notes, as “the lady with the hammer” because of her unrelenting rhythms.

The sleeve notes talk about her distinctive notation, which as far as most listeners will notice, talks about the dynamics and in particular her ffff and pppp contrasts. Her music is reportedly hard to play, presumably not because of the actual music but because it’s hard to get the overall sound right, and play it as it’s meant to be.

Russian pianist Natalia Andreeva, who now lectures in Australia, has studied Ustvolskaya in depth and captures the sound the composer wanted.The biggest clue to the music is that it’s “not just” about the bleakness of communism and a voice “from the Black Hole of Leningrad”, clearly an indication that there’s a lot of that about it. Andreeva herself says she focussed on three areas to draw out the flavour of the music: Russian folklore, religion (specifically the sound of church bells)… and human suffering from the Black Hole of Leningrad.

We were surprised to read the “The lady with the hammer” soubriquet because while the rhythm can be unvarying, it’s not forceful music, rather it’s bleak and abstract; it’s hopeful in the sense of “I hope I won’t die” rather than “I hope the sun shines”. It’s got a bleak edge to it that suggests uncertainty, as one might expect of communism.

This double CD opens with 12 preludes, which are gentler than other sections of the CD. Ustvolskaya tried to write them as if she was not influenced by any other composer. Then come the early and late sonatas, in order, the earliest taking the listener from CD1 to CD2, and the later ones being where the church bells come in, as Andreeva tries to evoke the composer’s instruction to play with feeling (she also directs some playing with the knuckles).

We like Ustvolskaya because she asked people not to analyse her music, just listen, and it is music that should be taken as it is. In a nutshell this is the opposite of romantic: it’s the melancholy of Russia, where happiness is probably laced with vodka and life is hard. It’s the soundtrack to a film about the beauty of concrete.

Until recently, the music of Galina Ustvolskaya had been neglected in Russia and little heard in the West. Born in 1919, this reclusive St Petersburg composer’s personal vision and stubborn self-will excluded her from mainstream musical life in the USSR. Unrelelenting rhythms in many works brought her the nickname ‘The Lady with the Hammer’.

Quite apart from its individual integrity, her work is driven by a spiritual ideal which would have placed her in diametrical opposition to the Communist state. She was a pupil of Shostakovich but developed her own very particular style, of which she said, ‘There is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead.’ Shostakovich supported her in the Union of Soviet Composers and sometimes sent her his own as yet unfinished works, attaching great value to her opinions. He wrote to her, ‘It is not you who are influenced by me; rather, it is I who am influenced by you.’ Ustvolskaya was an enigma: a quiet, reserved and introspective individual who wrote powerful, massively constructed (yet short in length) music which astounded her audiences.

Since her death in 2006 her music has become highly regarded and she is almost a cult figure. Russian pianist Natalia Andreeva has studied Ustvolskaya’s music in great depth and while fully committed to the great mechanistic climaxes also brings out in these recordings the lyrical and melodic qualities which are always present, especially in the earlier works such as the picturesque Preludes. This double CD is an invaluable introduction to a composer who will be seen in hindsight as a pivotal figure in the development of twentieth century Soviet/Russian music.

Galina Ustvolskaya reminds me of Elvis when once asked who he sounded like. The great man replied, ‘I don’t sound like nobody’. Ustvolskaya stated that ‘There is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead.’ She was a pupil of Dmitri Shostakovich from 1939 to 1947, but absorbed little of his style. This is not avant-garde music as such — the Soviet system would not have tolerated that — yet there is nothing here that makes reference to Prokofiev, Schnittke or Aram Khachaturian. I am not sure that the persistent source-critic would be unable to find some allusion to other composers here and there, but even the briefest of introductions to this music divulges a sound-world that is far removed from anything we have come to expect of Soviet Russian music. If I had to define it, I would describe the sound as being ‘naïve’ – not in a disparaging manner, but more like some mystical Rosicrucian pieces by Satie as suggested by Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise . In a British context, the eccentric composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji also resonates. Ustvolskaya has been given the soubriquet as ‘The Lady with the Hammer’ and this is sometimes appropriate. However, much of this music sounds tentative rather than violent or abrasive. Certainly, there is little in this music that is ‘easy’ on the ear: there is nothing romantic, neo-classical or jazz-inspired. It is typically austere.

Galina Ustvolskaya’s catalogue of works includes some 25 (or is it 21?) pieces written between 1946 and 1990 including five symphonies, the present six piano sonatas and some chamber music. Her output was limited: she believed in quality over quantity.

The piano works presented here were composed over a 39 year period. The earliest, the Sonata No.1 was written in 1947 and the short Sonata No.6 in 1988.

There is an excellent introduction to the composer on MusicWeb International written by Peter Grahame Woolf.

The first-rate liner notes by the present pianist Natalia Andreeva set out detailed information about all these pieces as well as some interpretive commentary. Andreeva gives some valuable hints about Ustvolskaya’s style by way of an analysis of the notation of her scores, which ‘are driven to extremes’. She mentions an absence of bar lines, restricted time signatures such as 1/4 and 1/8, use of cluster notation, precise and ‘often extreme’ dynamics varying from fffff to ppppp , sometimes virtually every chord, cluster and note is accented, which results in phenomenally subtle gradations of tone. There is a brief discussion as to ‘what the music is about’. Ustvolskaya was reticent in talking about or describing her music. Natalia Andreeva uses a personal hermeneutic to interpret this music that refers to Russian folklore, ‘the suffering in Leningrad/St Petersburg’ and finally, certain liturgical images such as church bells and chorales.

I have never heard any of the other versions (Frank Denyer, Markus Hinterhäuser and Ivan Sokolov) of this music that are currently available, so I cannot compare them with Andreeva’s interpretation. Yet, the present pianist contributes well to the bleakness, the barbarity and the abstraction of this music. She exhibits superb technical mastery of the music.

St Petersburg-born Andreeva combines her huge skill as a pianist with a strong academic interest. After her musical education at the Rimsky-Korsakov Musical College and the State Conservatorium of Music she studied in Chicago as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2013 she completed her PhD in Piano Performance in Australia at the Sydney Conservatorium and had further studies with the pianists Professor Viktor Abramov and Andrej Hoteev.

Andreeva has enjoyed a successful recital and recording career in Australia and Russia. She is currently Lecturer in Piano at the Sydney Conservatorium. Her Ustvolskaya ‘project’ began in 2006. She has regularly featured Ustvolskaya’s music in her recitals and finally recorded the ‘complete’ piano works in 2012.

I evaluate Galina Ustvolskaya’s music in two ways. Firstly, it does not appeal to me in the least: I would not listen to it by choice. Secondly, I recognise its huge importance and its massive contribution to Russian music. The exploration and assimilation of these works are at an early stage. I imagine that some listeners will be repulsed by Ustvolskaya’s musical language: others will want to join her on a long and intricate journey where ‘no one has gone before’ and may never go again.

Let me begin with a general assertion that might put a few backs up, but which I mean absolutely seriously. Has it not struck you, O intelligent Fanfare reader, that most of our major composers were a bloody strange lot—socially dysfunctional, obsessive, hyper-intelligent but with poor inter-personal communication skills, a narrow range of interests, often ritualized turns of behavior? Let’s list just a few folk who, to varying degrees, fit that bill: Alkan, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Brian, Bruckner, Humperdinck, Janácek, Mahler, Martinu, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Ravel, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Skryabin, Stravinsky. And we could extend the list almost indefinitely. I’m told by my psychologist friends that the term “Asperger’s Syndrome” has been retired from official use, but autism is a spectral condition—people are autistic to varying degrees of severity or mildness—and I would submit that most, perhaps all, of the world’s most important classical composers are to be found somewhere on the autistic scale. It’s not a value judgment, any more than observing left-handedness requires you to take a moral position. Moreover, we who write for Fanfare and you who read it will probably observe some signs of at least mild autism in our own behavior: I can’t be bothered with small talk, for example, and I either do something full-on or I don’t do it at all. In a review (in Notes ) of F. James Rybka’s Bohuslav Martinu: The Compulsion to Compose (Scarecrow Press, 2011), where Rybka suggests that Martinu had Asperger’s Syndrome, Erik Entwistle writes: “Associating Martinu with Asperger’s allows the composer’s fecundity to be regarded not with suspicion, but rather as a natural product of his abnormally developed brain, enabling him to compose at an incredible rate of speed. But this raises further questions. How then are we are to understand other highly prolific composers such as Mozart or Milhaud? Must they too be pathologized in order to be understood?” But surely that’s missing the point, which is that Martinu, Mozart, and Milhaud (and Telemann and others) did write an extraordinarily large quantity of music, and that in itself makes them abnormal and is a phenomenon that requires explanation.

What’s all that got to do with Ustvolskaya, who wrote notoriously little music? The point is that unusual fecundity isn’t the mark of every major composer, but a view of the world consistent with some degree of autism is, and there I move on to another generalization that might put some more backs up. Autism predominantly affects men (at a ratio of about 10 to 1); the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that autism accentuates a general disposition of men to be systematizers and of women to be empathizers. And there, I suspect, you have the explanation for the huge preponderance of male over female composers—because many more people with some degree of autism are male than are female, it follows that composers, systematizers par excellence , will more often be men.

Now we come back to Ustvolskaya. The behavior outlined at the outset of Natalia Andreeva’s detailed booklet essays that accompanies her recording of the complete Ustvolskaya piano music (90 minutes of music, presented as a two-for-the-price-of-one twofer) shows the social dysfunctionality characteristic of autism. And if you listen to the music with the possibility of autism in your mind, it suddenly becomes easier, if not to understand it, at least to understand where it comes from.

The 12 Preludes of 1953 postdate the first three piano sonatas (of 1947, 1949, and 1952) and predate the other three (from 1957, 1986, and 1988), and you can hear them as a mid-point in Ustvolskaya’s stylistic evolution, paring back the harmony (what remains is often generated by the counterpoint) and reducing melodies to angular, often repeated, shapes. It may be too hard-edged to be spellbinding, but its incantatory patterns and relentless repetitions do have a hypnotic effect, enhanced by the relative lack of variety in these most single-minded of preludes. Indeed, the unredeemed plainness of the idiom (its fons et origo would seem to be the ox-cart “Bydlo” in Mussorgsky’s Pictures ) allows the differences between the Preludes to show through more strongly than you might initially expect—No. 2 is surprisingly coquettish, for example, and No. 5 is purposive and direct, with an epilogue that barely dares speak. No. 7 likewise swivels between action and stasis, No. 8 is gentle and timorous, No. 9 barrels onwards in a single line propelled by bitonal chords in the left hand, No. 10 seems desperately world-weary, and so on. It says much for Natalia Andreeva that she gets such variety of expression from such self-contained material.

Ustvolskaya’s First Sonata (in four movements but over in just over 10 minutes) shows the same musical mind at work, but at this earlier stage in her development the links with the past are clearer, not least with Shostakovich in the cast of the gestures and melodic lines, an intermittent fondness for Beethovenian for trills, and here and there a hint of a darker Debussy. The two movement No. 2 opens with a listless Andante (not marked as such, since none of the works here bear tempo indications) but it allows rather more forward motion into the second of its two movements, which repeatedly ascends and descends the piano register as if not knowing which way to proceed. The first CD ends with the quarter-hour long Third Sonata which, though formed as a single movement, is strikingly episodic, as though cast from siblings of the Preludes that were to emerge a year later; its variegation ensures contrast, but works against the piece making much of an impression as a whole.

The shorter second disc presents the three remaining sonatas, which cover 31 years as to the six of the first three. No. 4 is, like No. 1, in four brief movements at around 11 minutes. Coming five years after its predecessor, it continues the process whereby points of articulation are leached away. Oddly, in Andreeva’s hands, No. 5 doesn’t seem that far away in stylistic terms from the works of the 1940s and 1950s; indeed, as it is comprised of 10 movements, each around 1–2 minutes in duration, it is easy to look at the work as yet another set of preludes—it has the same changes of mood within its restrained sound world. Where it differs is in the passages of unyielding clusters, but they function here, in Andreeva’s apercu , as an abstraction of bells, underlined by her use of pedal and dynamic variation. The one-movement Sixth Sonata, just over six minutes in length, perhaps most closely justifies the caricature of Ustvolskaya as “the lady with the hammer” earned by her ensemble pieces, but even here Andreeva brings light and variety to Ustvolskaya’s pounding clusters by taking the bell idea further, explaining that the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul has a tower where Belgian and Dutch carillons can be sounded at the same time as the Orthodox Russian bells; and she makes the piece sound like a random walk between these three independently operating systems.

The recordings were made at various times up to 2012 (not specified in the booklet), which accounts for some difference in the acoustic—it’s boomier in some pieces than in in others, and an occasionally close recording can make the pedal mechanism audible to varying degrees. (I normally object to its presence, but I don’t mind it here since it adds to the physicality of the music.) Most importantly, Andreeva gives us more to listen to than had struck me in this seemingly rebarbative music. I still think that autism may lie behind the means of (in)expression, but the witty, dedicated personality recalled in the writings of her students is closer to the surface here.