Music from the Black Hole Galina Ustvolskaya’s Piano Sonatas
Har r y Haskell
The history of 20-century music is replete with mavericks, misfits, and mystics, but no composer wore those labels more proudly—or with greater justification—than Galina Ustvolskaya. Born two years after the Russian Revolution in what was then called Petrograd, Ustvolskaya stayed tenaciously rooted in her native soil through the city’s transformation to Leningrad and its post- Soviet reincarnation as Saint Petersburg. She was one of Russian music’s notable survivors. And like other iconoclasts who refused to toe the party line, she paid a heavy price. Although Ustvolskaya escaped official condemnation, she was relegated to a kind of internal exile, a shadowy cult figure whose music was rarely heard in the USSR and all but unknown to the world at large until the late 1980s. Eleven years before her death she ventured abroad for the first time, to hear the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra premiere her Third Symphony under Valery Gergiev. But by then she had quit composing and had neither the strength nor the desire to bask in her belated celebrity. A recluse in her private life, Ustvolskaya was tight-lipped about her music; the few interviews she granted under duress tended to be terse and uninformative. Numerous anecdotes attest to her prickly personality. According to the musicologist Rachel Claire
