Last weekend the Southbank Centre erected a platform entitled “Sound Within Sound”, using the title of a recent book by Kate Molleson, to “shine a spotlight on composers who have been marginalised and whose work has been neglected or unheard”. The most significant of the ten composers featured on the programme was Galina Ustvolskaya, whose second and third symphonies were given first-rate performances by London Sinfonietta. The quality of the musicianship served up by the players and the sound they produced lit up the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Geoffrey Paterson’s reading of scores considered difficult and enigmatic was full of insight into the magnificent imagination of a composer who is still indeed neglected and rarely heard.
Ustvolskaya was a child of the Bolshevik Revolution and managed to outlive the regime it initiated by a couple of decades. Like countless others, her creative life was shaped by the strictures of Stalinism, but – and it is a significant but – unlike her fellow composers she withdrew into her own private world, becoming famously reclusive. She had a reputation for being uncommunicative, recalcitrant and curmudgeonly. There are only 21 works in her official catalogue; all the pieces created at the behest of the state having been “lost”, disowned, or destroyed. Her material is constructed of sculptured monodic lines, thick clusters, extremes of dynamics, idiosyncratic notation and arcane orthography. The stylistic scaffolding of this small oeuvre is constructed from a crochet pulse without bars, which dissolves any sense of rhythm; the relentless pounding of chords in most pieces has saddled her with the title of “The Lady with the Hammer”.
So much for the technicalities. Paterson and the London Sinfonietta showed that the monodic lines are made of the kind of light captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and its successors and sent back to us for our wonderment; they demonstrated that the weight of the clusters is not mere loudness, but the blossoming of an expressive force radiating through the fabric of the music. The apparent dissolution of a rhythmic drive was shown to be illusory; the inflections of faux-syncopation and minute fugitive motifs introduced a magical vibration into the lines of the narrative, making the sound quiver in the manner of a gentle breeze animating a spider’s web.
In most of her work Ustvolskaya draws on znamenny raspev, the chant of the Russian Orthodox Church, and in both symphonies she includes the narration of religious texts, not for their liturgical significance but for their relevance to her intensely spiritual life. Serge Merkusjev’s delivery of those texts was superlative; the timbre of his voice was cantorial, prophetic and otherworldly – I imagine Abraham must have sounded like that. Paterson highlighted what seems to be the obvious conclusion that Ustvolskaya chose the instrumentation to match the incantational power of the texts; multiple winds and brass, tenor and bass drums, piano and basses. Such an instrumentation, coupled with the form of the works, is for me evidence of the singularity of her craft, resonating with the Modernist aesthetic and cultivating a sonic space similar to that which can be recognised in the work of Xenakis.
It is time to include Ustvolskaya in the pantheon of the post-war avant-garde rather than keep her shackled to the ragged and lengthening shadow of Soviet empire.
