Ustvolskaya has burst into prominence recently, in the wake of the post-Cold war "thaw". This suddenness is illusory, however, because she has been toiling in relative obscurity for decades, steadily producing a substantial body of highly personal work (her one sighting on the international scene earlier was a much quoted remark by Shostakovich that in their lessons, she was as much the teacher as student). Ustvolskaya's music is unlike anything we have heard before, but in some ways it is so simple and direct that it seems incredible it didn't exist before. It is gaunt and intense in the extreme - rarely do rhythmic values become more subdivided than the eighth note, and counterpoint is largely two-part throughout. Octaves of parallel dissonances are common as an "orchestrational" tool in her repertoire of keyboard techniques. Textures are relentless, grinding, bare-boned. Contrasts are abrupt and stark; traditional transitions almost nonexistent. While the music bears a resemblance to Shostakovich's chamber works in their more lean and anguished moments, the similarity goes only so far. Ustvolskaya is a more pure and limited composer than her mentor. There is an amazing sense of laser-like focus in her work which keeps it from sounding bombastic. If there is any antecedent to her art, I suspect we would do better to look in the visual arts to the Russian Suprematist movement of early in this century, the idealistic, "transcendentalist" pursuit of pure geometric shapes and their expressive essence by such painters as Malevich and Popova.
Even though the six sonatas are very similar in technique and sound, they nevertheless each project a very distinct personality, largely through the different formal approaches each embodies.
No. 1 is a decidedly untraditional four-movement work, notable for how early (1947) Ustvolskaya had already defined so many of her trademark techniques.
No. 2 (1949) is a two-movement essay that basically develops the same material in each movement, the second startying over after the "failure" of the first and reaching a more overwhelming climax.
No. 3 (1952) is a single movement work (in clear sections), memorable for a few passacaglia-like textures and perhaps the most overtly Shostakovichian sound.
No. 4 (1957) is again in four movements, but it stands out as the quietest of the set, at times almost tongue-tied in its tentativeness, especially in its final movement.
No. 5 (1986) is made up of ten short movements, and has the chutzpah to relate every musical gesture back to a reiterated Db in the middle register of the piano, a type of gravitational center that is unyielding in its force.
And finally, No. 6 (1988), the most uncompromising of the set, is a single movement of throbbing clusters and pointillistic quarter notes; unforgiving, bleak, and crushing in its embrace of abrasive power.
Denyer's performances are compelling and pull off the enormous feat of making Ustvolskaya's music seem truly multidimensional. Denyer is able to create almost orchestral contrasts of dynamics and timbre that make the overall formal thrust of the music even clearer, and avoid the danger of making the piece into a mere essay in pounding.
The sound of the recording is almost ideal - full, close, clear, it projects the reality of concert performance without any of the sonic disadavantages.

Robert Carl
(From: "Fanfare", July-August 1996)

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.

David S. Gutman
(From: Gramophone, March 1996)