Almost forty years of Melodiya LPs yielded an extremely meager amount of Galina Ustvolskaya's music: her Children's Suite (conducted by Mravinsky, no less), an exciting tone poem Fire in the Steppes, a Shostakovich-like G-minor Piano Concerto and, finally, the spiky octet. It is likely that those familiar with these late 40s - early 50s compositions will be surprised (to say the least), by the stark, bleak, uncompromising, chilling power of the four works on Etcetera's compelling CD. They share a great degree of stylistic unity (despite being written over a thirty-eight-year span), spare textures, and great dynamic extremes, especially at the loud end. At her darkest, Ustvolskaya can, and does, make Shostakovich and Mahler appear incurably, hopelessly sanguine.
It is small wonder that Ustvolskaya's ascetic 1949 trio for clarinet, violin, and piano was never recorded by Melodiya, for it is far-removed from the era's near-pervasive, politically correct, Socialist-Realism. Truly phenomenal is its having been written late in Stalin's reign and only a year after the Zhdanov condemnations of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, et al.
Ustvolskaya, born in Petrograd in 1919, studied with Shostakovich, but her music shows only sporadic traces of his influence. One of those points appears at the beginning of her Grand Duet for cello and piano from 1959, which bears a resemblance to the opening of the finale of the Shostakovich Ninth Symphony. Marked by obsessive qualities, registral and dynamic extremes, great drive and momentum, the first four movements of the Grand Duet are piercing, concussive, and collisional; almost a musical equivalent of Kasimir Malevich's Suprematist paintings. While all five movements are played without pause, she makes a great impact with a brief silence at the beginning of the fifth movement. Following the first respite, the music turns austerely lyrical, the cello and piano diverge, and it ends in ambiguity.
The Piano Sonata No. 5 (1986) is music of rage. Not rage and redemption; just rage. With its power and rarefied atmosphere, it evokes in this listener echoes of early Prokofiev and Stockhausen's Klavierstücke. In ten short movements, played without pause, Ustvolsklaya piles on the clusters and high level dynamics. Particularly impressive is the second movement with its two melodic lines; one high and liturgical, the other a three-note figure rising from the deepest bass. The sonata scales the heights in the fifth movement where a reiterated single cluster at fff to fffff levels obsessively pounds away toward its violent ending.
"My music is never chamber music, not even in the case of a solo sonata" she has said. Her 8:00 single movement Fourth Symphony, scored for mezzo, trumpet, piano and tam-tam, offers persuasive evidence. If this potent music, which took two years (1985-1987) to complete, was any more concentrated, it would implode. With a wailing trumpet superimposed on dark, heavy piano chords augmented by the tam-tam, often played at triple-to-sextuple f levels, the Fourth Symphony seems almost a deconstruction of something liturgical. In sharp contrast to the purely instrumental phrases, the vocal line, possessing many of the spiritual or resigned qualities of some of Mahler's later songs, is predominantly quiet.
Strong, fervent performances by the Barton Workshop have been captured in big, close-up sound as powerful as the music. This one goes on this year's Want List. Strongly recommended to all whose horizons extend beyond pretty tunes.

Benjamin Pernick
"Fanfare"