Thoughts on Galina Ustvolskaya’s Third Piano Sonata
By Conor Hanick
Galina Ustvolskaya lived her whole life in one city with three names. Born in Petrograd in 1919, Ustvolskaya studied composition in Leningrad from 1937-1939, and died in Saint Petersburg in 2006. That she remained tenaciously rooted for nearly a century was not without a price: Ustvolskaya was a shadowy presence in Russian musical life, a cult figure trapped in a sort of internal exile; her music was rarely heard in the USSR, and it wasn’t until the late 80s that it premiered in the West. When she left Russia for the first time, eleven years before her death, to hear Gergiev conduct her Third Symphony in Amsterdam, she had quit composing. She returned to Saint Petersburg afterward and scarcely left again, with neither the strength nor desire to bask in her belated celebrity.
It is partially because there’s no analog to Ustvolskaya’s art that it is challenging to describe. While too many words have been wasted on her music’s superficial relationship to Dimitri Shostakovich’s—her teacher of two years—too few words have explored how her music represents a sort of “singularity” in the post-war avant-garde. Critics, listeners, and musicians who have tried to describe Ustvolskaya’s music on its own terms have tended to rely on grand, cosmic metaphors: imploding poles, dark stars, black holes. Some have likened its monolithic blocks to the apocalyptic geometry of Supermatism, or, as described by her longtime friend Victor Suslin, to the infinitely black, infinitely deep crater that was Saint Petersburg itself.
Ustvolskaya’s Six Piano Sonatas reside in these abysses. Their composition spans Ustvolskaya’s entire creative life and highlight stylistic transformations both radical and subtle. It’s tempting to see a parallel with Beethoven: both composers wrote for the piano throughout their life and used the piano sonata as a laboratory for exploring musical ideas. True as this may be, the goals of their research could not be more divergent. Beethoven is concerned with elevating material, transmogrifying an idea until sublime; Ustvolskaya, on the other hand, is concerned with excavating material, drilling into an idea until a subatomic structure is gleaned.
Language is again strained when describing how these ideas operate in Ustvolskaya’s Third Sonata; the work is but a single datapoint in a much larger, more profound experiment. The first musical cell in the Third Sonata is an important clue, though, about how the sonata understands itself: it begins with the same three notes that begin the Second Sonata, except transposed down a fifth. The behavior of this musical cell is also slightly altered: in the Second Sonata, the phrase teeters at the top of this three-note group and remains on the third degree; but in the Third Sonata, the phrase returns to the second note of the group, and—importantly—repeats it. These mutations, these near imperceptible alterations to the music’s genetic code, offer Ustvolskaya an entirely new expressive universe. Where the Second Sonata is taut and linear, unrelenting and focused, the Third is expansive and multi-dimensional, meditative and frenetic, full of subterranean vistas and glimpses of the ether.
The main structural blocks of the work—basically, different musics operating at slow, medium, and fast tempos—alternate and develop throughout the piece. The ways in which each section responds to—and is impacted by—adjacent sections is important to the sonata’s expressive arch. For me, though, these musical blocks orbit a stronger gravitational axis than just themselves, rather they circle a solemn chorale placed exactly at the sonata’s center (8:06 in this performance). The chorale contains nearly every composite part of the Sonata: the opening theme; the wailing descending half-steps of the second theme; the rhythmic schema of the fast sections; and the eloquence, trauma, cataclysm, and recovery that the entire work concerns itself with. It is perhaps the most spoken music in all of the Piano Sonatas, and, to me, is a seismic event whose foreshocks and aftershocks are felt along the continuum of Ustvolskaya’s profound art.
By Conor Hanick
Galina Ustvolskaya lived her whole life in one city with three names. Born in Petrograd in 1919, Ustvolskaya studied composition in Leningrad from 1937-1939, and died in Saint Petersburg in 2006. That she remained tenaciously rooted for nearly a century was not without a price: Ustvolskaya was a shadowy presence in Russian musical life, a cult figure trapped in a sort of internal exile; her music was rarely heard in the USSR, and it wasn’t until the late 80s that it premiered in the West. When she left Russia for the first time, eleven years before her death, to hear Gergiev conduct her Third Symphony in Amsterdam, she had quit composing. She returned to Saint Petersburg afterward and scarcely left again, with neither the strength nor desire to bask in her belated celebrity.
It is partially because there’s no analog to Ustvolskaya’s art that it is challenging to describe. While too many words have been wasted on her music’s superficial relationship to Dimitri Shostakovich’s—her teacher of two years—too few words have explored how her music represents a sort of “singularity” in the post-war avant-garde. Critics, listeners, and musicians who have tried to describe Ustvolskaya’s music on its own terms have tended to rely on grand, cosmic metaphors: imploding poles, dark stars, black holes. Some have likened its monolithic blocks to the apocalyptic geometry of Supermatism, or, as described by her longtime friend Victor Suslin, to the infinitely black, infinitely deep crater that was Saint Petersburg itself.
Ustvolskaya’s Six Piano Sonatas reside in these abysses. Their composition spans Ustvolskaya’s entire creative life and highlight stylistic transformations both radical and subtle. It’s tempting to see a parallel with Beethoven: both composers wrote for the piano throughout their life and used the piano sonata as a laboratory for exploring musical ideas. True as this may be, the goals of their research could not be more divergent. Beethoven is concerned with elevating material, transmogrifying an idea until sublime; Ustvolskaya, on the other hand, is concerned with excavating material, drilling into an idea until a subatomic structure is gleaned.
Language is again strained when describing how these ideas operate in Ustvolskaya’s Third Sonata; the work is but a single datapoint in a much larger, more profound experiment. The first musical cell in the Third Sonata is an important clue, though, about how the sonata understands itself: it begins with the same three notes that begin the Second Sonata, except transposed down a fifth. The behavior of this musical cell is also slightly altered: in the Second Sonata, the phrase teeters at the top of this three-note group and remains on the third degree; but in the Third Sonata, the phrase returns to the second note of the group, and—importantly—repeats it. These mutations, these near imperceptible alterations to the music’s genetic code, offer Ustvolskaya an entirely new expressive universe. Where the Second Sonata is taut and linear, unrelenting and focused, the Third is expansive and multi-dimensional, meditative and frenetic, full of subterranean vistas and glimpses of the ether.
The main structural blocks of the work—basically, different musics operating at slow, medium, and fast tempos—alternate and develop throughout the piece. The ways in which each section responds to—and is impacted by—adjacent sections is important to the sonata’s expressive arch. For me, though, these musical blocks orbit a stronger gravitational axis than just themselves, rather they circle a solemn chorale placed exactly at the sonata’s center (8:06 in this performance). The chorale contains nearly every composite part of the Sonata: the opening theme; the wailing descending half-steps of the second theme; the rhythmic schema of the fast sections; and the eloquence, trauma, cataclysm, and recovery that the entire work concerns itself with. It is perhaps the most spoken music in all of the Piano Sonatas, and, to me, is a seismic event whose foreshocks and aftershocks are felt along the continuum of Ustvolskaya’s profound art.
© Conor Hanick
Pianist Conor Hanick “defies human description” for some (Concerto Net) and recalls “a young Peter Serkin” for others (The New York Times). He has performed to acclaim throughout the world with some of music’s leading ensembles, instrumentalists, and conductors, including Pierre Boulez, Alan Gilbert, Ludovic Morlot, and David Robertson. A fierce advocate for the music of today, and the “soloist of choice for such thorny works,” (NYT) Hanick has premiered over 200 works to date
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and worked with musical icons like Steve Reich, Kaija Saariaho, and Charles Wuorinen, while also championing important voices of his own generation including Caroline Shaw, Eric Wubbels, Nina Young, and Marcos Balter. Hanick has recently appeared with The Seattle Symphony, The Juilliard Orchestra, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Lucerne Academy Orchestra for the New York Philharmonic Biennial, and been presented at Carnegie Hall, the Mondavi Center, the Kennedy Center, and the Metropolitan Museum. He collaborates regularly with Jay Campbell, Joshua Roman, Miranda Cuckson, and Augustin Hadelich and is a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company, with which he serve as co-director of the Ojai Festival in 2022. Mr. Hanick is the director of Solo Piano at the Music Academy of the West and a graduate of Northwestern University and The Juilliard School, where he serves on the chamber music and keyboard faculty.