Other Minds welcomes Conor Hanick for a performance of the complete piano sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) at The Freight & Salvage in Berkeley on Monday, October 28, 2024. The performance will be preceded by a talk on Ustvolskaya’s music by musicologist and 20th Century Russian and Soviet music specialist Simon Morrison.
Born in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1919, Galina Ustvolskaya’s expressive and vigorous music was deemed problematic in the USSR early in her career and did not receive widespread attention in her home country until the 1960s and 70s, and abroad only in the late 1980s. She taught at the Leningrad Rimsky-Korsakov College of Music from 1947-1977 and over the past three decades her music has experienced an increasing amount of performances and acclaim in the West. Ustvolskaya’s six piano sonatas were written between 1947 and 1988. The earlier sonatas have been compared by Alex Ross to the “static, starkly dissonant pieces” of Erik Satie and the violent, cluster-filled later sonatas, a critic once referred to her as “the lady with the hammer,” are reminiscent of the piano music of American experimentalists Henry Cowell and Leo Ornstein. Other Minds is pleased to be presenting a rare performance of all six sonatas as a single event in Berkeley this October.