Search - Ustvolskaya, Malov :: Galina Ustvolskaya: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-6 - Oleg Malov

Chimes at midnight

scarecrow | 05/11/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Ustvolskaya herself says that those who love her music should refrain from trying to analyse it. I can only recommend that one listen to and explore its beauty for themselves. I can at least say that the last 2 piano sonatas are formless and full of tone clusters, the others being slightly more shapely. It is, actually, very hard music to describe, but it is to be cherished."

Has documnetary-like value

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 12/16/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"We have all Six Piano Sonatas from different periods in Ustvolskaya's life, and the tone, gesture,content and meaning of each can reflect Russia's rather dark history.I say "can" for those who would simply refuse to acknowledge that a composer lives in the real world, and may perhaps be influenced by events, and the times one lives in, a lifeworld. For how does music resonate? if not with a "reality". This sort of analysis is frowned upon via academia,(maybe now the tune has changed with interdisciplinary values imparted on the Commons)but there has always been a prejudiced demeanor for speaking about music with such dirty elements as politics and social formations as guiding templates; but then how does one proceed?,

Here is music from reality, the First Sonata begins with biting unadorned single strident tones,no accompaniment, no harmony just cold counterpoint,much like a Moscow flat in 1949 when it was written.The content here is deeply compelling even if the rhythmic repetion becomes cumbersome. Well that is an element of modernity,the heaviness repsition of materials conveys.

The Second Sonata seems like a continuation of the First,dated also 1949,quite compact, very classical in shape and design, here we have half-steps that tells this linear dissonant narrative, again quite bleak. But I found some dignity here in this situation. Shostakovich her mentor had similar persuasions he also gazed out for whatever there was to see around him, missing friends, war, tyranny,cultural freezes but Ustvolskaya seems to say much more in her own introspective language.This is a purely functional language somewhat tonal with points of reference where Shostakovich found delight in referential games and metaphors playful sarcasm, irony of sorts, here for Ustvolskaya there is no time for such "indulgences" these Sonatas seem more directed toward her subject,no subterfuges.Perhaps that's why her music was hardly played during her lifetime,the more truth the less one is heard.

These works are like "dialogues" with documentary-like value, one's own introspection and with reality as perceived through piano timbre. The Third Sonata now 1952,simply continues this narrative, cold again "senza pedal" much of the time, simply dry un-resonant tones; not till the Fourth Sonata does she burst out(eclat) it seems with chordal declamations,this is post-Stalin(well a transmogrification of Stalin designs) the era of Khruschev and expansion, the Cold War and we find single surface claims of openness and spirit in the music, like something has returned to the piano, it has a voice, but now it seems impersonal,more social,a collective voice,then the Fifth Sonata is Prokovievian, with its machine third person brutality, its charged direction, incredibly rhythmic,no more single dialogic tones, and the Sixth Sonata has smatterings of West European modernity, well all these Sonatas exhibit a modernity, in starkness in simple unobtrusive lines pitted against each other.

Oleg Malov seems to understand the pain,depth, fortitude,courage,odiousness,clamour,internal arrogance and spirit that is part of these works. I beleive in clarity here that makes for compelling music. I haven't heard Hinterhauser,but I doubt if he will stray too far from Malov."