The composer Galina Ustvolskaya, born in 1919 during the Russian Revolution, survived Stalinism and lived through glasnost and into the era of Vladimir Putin, dying in 2006 at age 87. During the Stalinist years, she wrote patriotic music the government would approve of, works like Young Pioneers’ Suite and Children’s Suite, along with film scores. She later rejected these pieces, classifying only a handful of them as her “true works.”
Between 1947 and 1988, she composed half a dozen wildly idiosyncratic piano sonatas. The first four had to wait decades for their premiere performances, owing to the political and musical climate in the Soviet Union, while the last two, written in a more liberal era, were performed soon after they were finished.
On Monday, Oct. 28, following a talk by Princeton University historian and musicologist Simon Morrison, pianist Conor Hanick played all six sonatas at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage. The performance, presented by Other Minds, took a bit over an hour, yet the power and concentration of these works made them feel as though they expanded to fill all the time and space in the universe.
Hanick played the concert on a Yamaha grand piano with a marvelously clear and bright sound (without the bass boom of a typical Steinway). His style and the piano’s tone suited the austerity of Ustvolskaya’s music, which inhabits a dry sound world with little pedaling or softening of the piano.
The six sonatas take different musical approaches, though there are some commonalities. Ustvolskaya’s use of musical materials is economical in the extreme. She’ll choose a motif or chord progression and build on it without introducing new material –– hence the brevity of each movement.
The pieces don’t follow the typical structure of Classical- or Romantic-era sonatas. Each has unusual numbers of movements. The First and Fourth Sonatas each have four; the Third and Sixth Sonatas each have one. The Second Sonata has two, and the Fifth has 10. Perhaps calling them sonatas was a mere convenience.
While it was true, as Hanick assured us, that one could hear where each sonata began and ended, it wasn’t always easy to tell where the movement boundaries were. When the concert ended, I thought he was still somewhere in the Fifth Sonata.
There is plenty of variety in the six sonatas, however austere. The first movement of the First Sonata sometimes sounds like demented species counterpoint, playing at following strict compositional rules but actually violating them.
Another movement has fleeting reminiscences of the Arietta from Beethoven’s last piano sonata, which, in the third variation, sounds like boogie-woogie. Cloudy sonorities elsewhere resemble the piano pieces of Claude Debussy. The Third Sonata contains a passage that chimes like the solo piano in Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka. All of this is quite strange coming from a composer who tried to hold her music in isolation, denying that it had any context.
There’s a prevailing toughness to Ustvolskaya’s music, in the dissonances, the dryness of most of the textures, the extremes of registers and dynamics (everything seems very loud or very soft), and the rigid limits she seems to place on rhythmic variety. Obsessive rhythms are commonplace.
The Fifth Sonata includes a movement of bumptiously pounding tone clusters, followed by considerably lighter, even delicate, writing. Still, the piece overall becomes more assaultive as it progresses.
Some of the other sonatas are just plain violent. In the Sixth, the pianist must play loud repeated tone clusters with one forearm, practically attacking the instrument. The composer calls for pages and pages of playing extremely loudly –– or extremely softly.
Hanick performed all of the sonatas with the total commitment they require; with musicality, seriousness, and respect; with affection and, when needed, tenderness. You could not ask for more, except for the opportunity to hear him do it all over again.
