Galina Ustvolskaya – Symphony No. 5 “Amen”

by 5:4

Everybody needs more Galina Ustvolskaya in their life. Especially at this time of year, which so easily and so unthinkingly tends to the traditional, the saccharine and the stupid. i’ve explored Ustvolskaya’s bracingly refreshing, invariably mesmerising music on several occasions, including her first and third symphonies. i remarked before about the way in which religious fervour is nominally fundamental to her last four symphonies, which a casual listener may find at odds with her cool, acerbic musical language. Yet i’ve come to the conclusion that this is surely the only religious music i can take remotely seriously. i feel obliged to quote from my discussion of Symphony No. 3: “religion … is riven with and arguably defined by guilt, conflict, misunderstanding, doubt, intolerance and fear. With this in mind, Ustvolskaya’s music speaks with a terrifying clarity and immediacy that … makes one seriously question why there isn’t more religious music displaying a similar kind of aesthetic. Heads in the clouds? or in the sand?” Ustvolskaya’s mode of expression doesn’t just make sense, it makes the only sense.

Symphony No. 5 “Amen”, Ustvolskaya’s final composition completed in 1990, is a work for voice, violin, oboe, trumpet, tuba and a large wooden cube. Its text comprises the Lord’s Prayer, to be spoken in Russian, German or English. The context for the prayer is an astringent network of circular motifs, all of which play out within Ustvolskaya’s strict, unwavering metric grid. The oboe has the makings of a melody, though sufficiently limited in scope that it feels like an extended motif. The trumpet and tuba, often muted, have even more restricted movement, to the extent that calling them countermelodies is a bit generous (at times they’re limited to just a single pitch, repeated notes in the trumpet, sustained pedals in the tuba, as at the start of the piece). All three of these lines have each and every note given a tenuto line, literally underlining a sense of dogged tenacity. The violin has a short, halting, falling phrase that appears sporadically, all of its notes to played on an upbow, and always accented. To an extent it falls to the cube to reinforce the symphony’s metric foundation, though its presence is also occasional, tending more to punctuate or link between passages than to drive them onward, at times switching to an extended roll. The voice articulates the words one phrase at a time, and is the only member of the ensemble to have a non-notated part, and (implied by the placement of the words in the score) thereby the only element to exist outside, or at least adjacent to, the metric grid.

The symphony unfolds as so many permutations on these cycling motifs – with dynamic variations, and ideas sometimes swapping betwen parts – but as if to counter the possibility that it might be confused for some sort of blank, emotionless slog, Ustvolskaya litters the score with the word “espressivo”: it’s the one word used as an instruction for everyone at the start, the individual parts (including the cube) are marked “espr.”, with the violin going one further, “fervido!”.

Galina Ustvolskaya – Symphony No. 5, fig. 13

Beyond this, on several occasions everyone abruptly switches to fortissimo, the vocal part now indicated “espressivissimo!”, repeating “Our Father!” as the parts march forward. The net result is a music that feels rooted in not merely the reality but the very epitome of religious superstition, filled with overwhelming existential desperation in the face of some entirely imagined terrifying horror.

This performance of Symphony No. 5 was given by Ensemble Phoenix Basel, directed by Jürg Henneberger, with speaker Kirill Zvegintsov, in March this year. One of the things i especially like about it is the brisk tempo. Ustvolskaya indicates what she calls a “symbolic metronome” in the score of ♩=72, and Ensemble Phoenix stay much closer to that than the available recordings (by St Petersburg Soloists and London Musici respectively), both of which hover around an absurdly slow ♩=52. Faster is definitely better – perhaps a good rule of thumb in all of Ustvolskaya’s music – as it emphasises the forward motion, gives palpable electricity to the music and definitely enhances that air of frightened anguish, so quintessential to all acts of prayer. One moment in particular that’s especially powerful comes just after eight minutes in, as it’s the only occasion when, just for two bars, the violin speaks entirely alone. In this performance, the violinist allows themself just the slightest flexibility of tempo, in a unique moment of rubato that heightens the emotional intensity in the most subtle of ways; it’s like hearing somone’s voice catch in an instant of emotional overload, quickly lost (but not forgotten) as the ensemble marches inexorably on. Zvegintsov’s delivery is excellent, with just the right balance of inscrutable and desperate; at times he seems entirely baffled to be in this situation, elsewhere as if it’s the only situation where anything makes any sense at all.

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