“While this year marks the centenary of Galina Ustvolskaya’s birth, on June 17, 1919, the occasion has largely been overlooked by the music world,” writes Gabrielle Cornish in Sunday’s (9/29) New York Times. “American audiences have long embraced her Soviet peers, like Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Schnittke, but Ustvolskaya is hardly played in this country. Even in her native Russia, her works are seldom performed outside of academic and new-music circles.… When she died, in December 2006, she had approved for performance just 21 works. Slowly but surely, though, scholars and performers are embracing Ustvolskaya’s music, which … she characterized [as] truly new: grueling but cathartic, shockingly visceral and fleetingly metaphysical…. Her mature style … was defined by oscillation between loudness and silence. Written in 1979, her Symphony No. 2 begins with a pianist traversing the length of the keyboard, hammering tone clusters, with punctuation coming in the form of massive bass drum hits.… She … spent the last 15 years of her life living an ascetic, monastic life.… [Pianist and impresario] Markus Hinterhäuser likened her works to Malevich’s stark black-and-white Suprematist paintings … ‘You can’t talk much about it…. But you have to accept that it’s there, it exists.’ ”
Posted October 2, 2019
