Festival Archipel 2019, Genève - biographie de Galina Ustvolskaïa

D.R.

In concert

Played works

Born in Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg) in 1919, Galina Ivanova Ustvolskaya became in 1939 the student of Dimitri Shostakovich, then professor of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The great Soviet composer will defend his pupil, whom he regarded as a peer, in front of the inevitable accusations of "formalism" which she will pay the price as soon as she abandons, after the war, the traditional schemas to devote herself to a music as little philharmonic as possible and whose extreme radicalism will be compared to that of the "supremacist" pictorial movement. Occasionally citing Ustvolskaya's music in his own compositions, Shostakovich ensured: "She deserves worldwide recognition from all who are interested in musical truth." Interested in strange formations (she wrote in 1950 a piece for two oboes, four violins, timpani and piano), Galina Ustvolskaya will continue to practice unusual instrumentariums. Her cycle (1971-1975) titled Compositions is designed for assemblies as rare as piccolo flute, tuba and piano or eight double basses, percussion and piano or four

flutes, four bassoons and piano (the cycle is recorded by the Schoenberg Ensemble from Amsterdam on the Philips Classics label. Reinbert de Leeuw, the conductor of this group, will also do a lot for the diffusion of the composer's Piano Sonatas. Galina Ustvolskaya had anchored her music in a religious context and preferred it to be performed in churches. Despite the recent renewed attention to her work, she will not benefit from the enormous attention lavished on her sister Sofia Gubaidulina, also presented as a "sacrificed" of contemporary Russian music. It is true that neither her music, which does not concede to the ease of listening, nor her reclusive way of life will have helped to make Ustvolskaya familiar to the general public, even to the specialized public of contemporary music. The violent rhythmic sequences, of which the music of Ustvolskaya is customary (in Composition II, for example), had been nicknamed by the Dutch music critic and musicologist Elmer Schönberger "the woman with the hammer".