Galina Ustvolskaya - Symphonies Nos. 1-5

Galina USTVOLSKAYA (1919-2006)

Symphony No. 1 for two boys’ voices and orchestra (1955-1956)

Symphony No, 2 True and Eternal Bliss for male reciter and small orchestra (1979)

Symphony No. 3 Jesus Messiah, save us!  for male reciter and small orchestra (1983)

Symphony No. 4 Prayer for contralto, piano, trumpet and tamtam (1985-1986)

Symphony No, 5 for male reciter, oboe, trumpet, tuba, violin and percussion (wooden cube)

Oliver Barlow and Arlo Murray (boy trebles), 

Barbara Kozelj (contralto), 

Sergej Merkusjev (reciter), 

Joonas Ahonen (piano)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Karlsen

rec. 2023, Henry Wood Hall, London, UK

Review:

Writing symphonies in Moscow during the post-war era (1955‑90) implies a continuation of a central tradition which these works comprehensively and often aggressively reject. A more relevant approach might be via the contemporary art being made at the fringes of the Soviet Union: the music of Giya Kancheli in Tbilisi, for example; or of Valentin Silvestrov in Kyiv, before he went tonal; and most of all the ritualistic films of the director Sergei Parajanov, born to Armenian parents in Tbilisi.

As for Ustvolskaya: these symphonies express – to me – an oblique and personal relationship with Orthodox religion, and a rebellious resistance to Soviet authoritarianism and atheism. Jesus, Messiah, Save Us! is the subtitle of the Third, in the spirit of Psalm 51, the Miserere. In fact the impassioned reciters for both the Third and Fourth Symphonies intone an 11th-century hymn, against the backdrop of solemn instrumental chorales, versicles and refrains which correspond to the shape and harmony of Stravinsky’s late religious works such as the Requiem Canticles, and at their shared root, to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. There is something ancient and immovable about this music, for all its apparent discontinuities and sometimes abrasive modernity (see again the comparisons with Kancheli and Parajanov). As sung by a treble in the second movement of the First Symphony, Ustvolskaya’s setting of a macabre-poetic children’s fable by Gianni Rodari even magically spirits us back to the world of The Firebird and The Rite.

Meanwhile, the Miserere looks for hope in the ‘sacrifices of righteousness’ demanding ‘bullocks upon thine altar’, and Ustvolskaya has frequent recourse to a kind of instrumental altar of her own, a wooden box which punctuates her syntax with tapping and thumping and (in the Second especially) full-on, Mahler-Sixth-style cracks. A personal but time-honoured refinement of symphonic style also plays out across the five works, as they place ever greater store by fewer and more isolated gestures: perhaps the only signal point of comparison with her one-time teacher, Shostakovich.

Bearing every sign of careful preparation, these performances make the most compelling case for Ustvolskaya as her own woman. The recording, too, is exemplary in capturing the required range of volume and intensity without demanding adjustment on the listener’s part between (in No 4) a whispered solo voice or muted trumpet and earth-shaking gong strokes. The booklet prints both sung texts and translations, a picture of the big wooden box, and a good essay by Elena Dubinets.

Gramophone