“Everybody needs more Galina Ustvolskaya in their life.” That’s what i wrote last December, when discussing her Symphony No. 5 in my Advent Calendar, and it’s nice to think that the BIS record label read those words and decided to act on them. i very much doubt that’s the case, but regardless, it’s wonderful to be able to experience their newly-released recording of all five of her symphonies, performed by the London Philharmonic conducted by Christian Karlsen.
Ustvolskaya’s music is not badly represented by recordings, though by far they’re skewed toward her solo piano works and chamber music. By contrast, the symphonies – arguably the most potent works of her entire output – are seriously neglected. Incredibly, with one exception they’ve only been recorded once – by the Ural Philharmonic and St. Petersburg Soloists, conducted by Dmitri Liss – as part of the landmark series of Ustvolskaya albums released by Megadisc no fewer than 25 years ago. (Symphony No. 5 was also recorded by London Musici in a recording from the same time.) For the past quarter of a century those recordings have been the reference for these rarely-heard works, but now they’ve been unequivocally supplanted.
i explored Symphony No. 1 in some depth during my 2023 Lent Series, so i won’t repeat here all of the details regarding its text, structure, and so on. That was an excellent live performance given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Hannu Lintu, which i found more compelling than the Ural Philharmonic and Dmitri Liss recording. This was, if you like, the first concrete evidence that those performances weren’t necessarily definitive, just the only option we had. To be clear, the Liss recording is fine, it’s a strong presentation of a complex work, but the new LPO recording blows it away.
In the instrumental part 1, Karlsen gets a wonderful balance of warmth (in the flutes and oboes) that’s immediately undermined, capturing in this introduction something essential about the work’s unique form of austere lyricism. We feel both touched and pushed away, an ambivalence that perhaps characterises Ustvolskaya’s entire output; and it’s mesmerising, all the more so when the winds assemble into little clustering surges before returning to the opening idea.
The large central section – which feels huge but in fact lasts under 20 minutes – takes that balance and applies it the eight songs. Something that becomes very apparent here is the differing approach to tempo, not just here but in almost all of the symphonies: Liss was surprisingly quick, while Karlsen isn’t so much slow as simply cleaving to what Ustvolskaya actually asks for in the score. There are times when i like Liss’s impetuous approach, but it does distort the mode of expression, and it’s impossible to argue with what happens when Karlsen sticks to Ustvolskaya’s instructions.
Apropos: ‘Ciccio’ no longer sounds hurried but allows time for the voice and its message to register. Karlsen gives the late sequence referencing gardens and fountains a lovely bright richness, which makes the subsequent return to coolness feel more stark and powerful. ‘Carousel’ – in a sign of things to come in all these LPO performances – is seriously harsh and intense, as if the instruments were closing in on the voices. For their part, the two boys (Oliver Barlow and Arlo Murray, both excellent) are beautiful in the way they project a heartfelt humanity despite the surrounding intimidation. (The soloists in the Liss recording sound younger and more vulnerable, a different effect that has its own advantages.)
The unwavering focus Karlsen brings to the piece almost feels too much in ‘Saturday night’, where its strong neutrality almost becomes a kind of blankness, made rather eerie in the close-micing of the voices. Whereas in ‘Boy from Módena’ the balance starts to swing again, demonstrating strength and fullness that are immediately cancelled out each time. Likewise, we move from considerable vulnerability to a super-intense climactic duet, the boys almost shouting together. Harshness comes to the fore again in “Buy jumble” (aka “We take junk”), where it’s exacerbated by a trumpet that makes the voices sound even more acidic and biting. The strings’ accents are like knife slashes, while the boys end up seemingly robotic. In ‘The Waiting Room’, wild oscillations – now neutral, now intense – make everything unsettling, while in ‘When factory chimneys die’ the boys themselves embody the harshness, their cries reinforced by the orchestra, a spellbinding sequence that, again, splits later in a schizoid mix of robotic staccatos and lyricism, the latter featuring a gorgeous deep tuba.
The epilogue, ‘Sun’ is genuinely hypnotic, the high voices (Barlow and Murray at their most superb) surrounded by a greater sense of (appropriate) warmth though this is undermined by being polarised and, in due course, the instruments merging and clustering, turning severe. The symphony’s concluding Part 3 feels like a continuation of the vocal strands, now made more brisk (Ustvolskaya raises the tempo from 60 to 108). There’s an exquisite richness in chords behind the flute line – still balancing cool and warm – while the conclusion indicates more than a little of the Ustvolskaya to come. The coolth turns astringently nasal; the warmth turns ominous, real drama going on below the surface while the strings are like a hanging sheet. Everything could explode, and though things pound (a real WOW moment) after it’s as if nothing had happened. We’re left somewhat dazed, with the impression of a sense of denial – or perhaps just an inability to deal with the enormity of what’s been expressed.
It makes sense to consider the remaining four symphonies together; they’re separate, self-contained works, but at the same time they occupy the same soundworld, function in similar ways and exhibit more than a little continuity. Part of that continuity is reduction, in terms of both instrumentation – Nos. 2 and 3 use a small orchestra, Nos. 4 and 5 just a handful of players – and duration, with No. 4 lasting a mere seven minutes. Their modus operandi consists of a small number of ideas that are subject to structural permutations and small-scale alterations. One example that occurs on a number of occasions is that two instruments within an idea will swap their material (typically one ascending, one descending), adding a little variety.
Furthermore, all four of these symphonies feature the human voice – a reciter in Nos. 2, 3 and 5, a contralto in No. 4 – and the text in three of the symphonies comes from the same source, an obscure 11th century monk named Hermann of Reichenau (a.k.a. Hermannus Contractus or Herman the Cripple). The text is essentially a short exhortation of praise and petition (translated from the original Latin into Russian), used in Nos. 2 to 4, while No. 5 opts for the lengthier Lord’s Prayer (again in Russian). So these four symphonies therefore operate as a group of like-minded, behaviourally-related works, united by both their musical and textual focus.
Importantly, they’re all also positioned at a point of extremity, displaying such unrestrained expression it indicates pure desperation (in this respect, they’re connected back to Symphony No. 1). These are not just symphonic prayers, they articulate an earnest, frantic, even somewhat crazed mindset seemingly convinced that life itself depends on this act. As i’ve noted previously when discussing Symphony No. 5, this form of religious expression doesn’t just make sense, “it makes the only sense”.
The LPO’s performance of Symphony No. 2 “True and Eternal Bliss!” lasts a full six minutes longer than Liss, sticking firmly to the metronome mark of 60 like an atomic clock, and the clarity is overwhelmingly more vivid. This may well be the highlight of the album as a whole, as Karlsen fearlessly leans into its abject, apocalyptic tone. The drum accents are wince-inducingly impactful, like literal blows to the chest, answered by looming crescendi in wind and brass. But the voice! Where the Liss recording used the surprisingly soft, high voice of Pavel Nemytov, Karlsen has the wild, stentorian tones of Sergej Merkusjev, whose desperation is unequivocal, and literally amazing to behold. The cresendi enclose him, clusters becoming like buzzing insects all around, but in due course there’s a palpable sense that the instruments are responding to the voice, its impact changing their behaviour.
Perhaps it’s surprising that Ustvolskaya’s music hasn’t brought Beckett to my mind before, but in this performance it does, articulating something of his famous lines from The Unnameable, “You must go on. / I can’t go on. / I’ll go on.” It’s the relentlessness of it all that most directly suggests this, and this is interesting not only within Symphony No. 2, but in the following symphonies too, both individually and across them as a group. Music at a point of total despair, total collapse, yet never stopping, never flagging (except, perhaps, the end of Symphony No. 3), running on fumes, perhaps even on auto pilot.
There’s a comparable sense of shock in Symphony No. 3 “Jesus Messiah, Save Us!” (a work i explored in 2016), its polarised opening sounding both extremely close and starkly panned: low left, high right. Both here and elsewhere the LPO wind players achieve genuine sagging glissandi on their instruments, something that Liss’s Ural Philharmonic players could seemingly never accomplish. They add a heartbreaking subtlety to the music, jarring against a palpable anger in the ensuing chords, as if they were compressed in a tight container. The unstoppability here suggests a possibility of explosion, though ultimately Ustvolskaya holds the forces in an ultra-taut, strained equilibrium.
An additional aspect that sets these new performances leaps and bounds ahead of the Liss recordings is the way they handle the works’ unexpected passages. When the voice expands beyond its opening phrase in Symphony No. 2, the atmosphere turns tense and bristling, a mix of sustained oboes and low tuba and piano, with a bass drum roll making it all horribly claustrophobic. It’s an enormously weird and oppressive sequence. Likewise in Symphony No. 3, a few minutes in, when there’s an alarming shift to just dry drums, as if everything had been filtered or erased entirely. It happens again toward the end, leading into an unexpected conclusion of enervation, the only time in these symphonies when the ability to keep going seems to fail.
Though it seems impossible, Karlsen ramps things up in Symphony No. 4 “Prayer”, eliciting such terrifying opening crescendos and tam-tam crashes (making the Liss recording seem downright tepid) that it’s as if we’ve plunged into a climax in medias res. Particularly outstanding here is contralto Barbara Kozelj, who responds to Ustvolskaya’s simple vocal setting with subtle variety of expression; she’s no robot, and each phrase has a unique, very human, articulation. The piano response to this is staggeringly explosive, but what makes this performance so apocalyptic is the contrast between such almost outlandish ferocity and the streaks of lyricism that are allowed to speak. On several occasions the piano holds a sustained chord, over which Kozelj initially asseverates, but after turns more reflective, even tender. Moments like this in Ustvolskaya’s music are rare, and they point to the fact that there’s a lot more going on under the surface.
Symphony No. 5 “Amen”, Ustvolskaya’s final composition (completed in 1990), seems to continue from where No. 4 finished. The LPO tuba is gorgeously deep and gravelly, almost as if it’s not an instrument, while the oboe seems to pick up the contralto’s lyrical thread. Sergej Merkusjev adopts an inscrutable tone at first, managing to sound desperate and neutral simultaneously, a dazed combination of petition and statement. This is reinforced by the instrumental material, an archtype of regularity, circularity and restriction, moving in circles, going nowhere. The outbursts, when they come, are a pure in extremis display. No holds barred, complete mania in Merkusjev’s cries, while the ensemble encapsulates the atmosphere, almost keeping a respectful distance.
It’s hard not to hear Symphonies Nos. 2 to 4 as all leading to this massive plea to an imagined almighty being. There are vestiges of lyricism, such as when the tuba just about continues from its opening pedal notes into something briefly ruminative. But this is a blasted, ruined soundscape, post-apocalyptic, and Karlsen quite rightly keeps everything marshalled. When writing about this symphony last year i remarked on the fleeting moment when the violin is heard entirely alone; in that live performance, the violinist used just a touch of rubato, which was very effective indeed. There’s not a trace of that here, it’s just another block of the same material in its current permutation, and in this interpretation it works perfectly. The work’s final bangs on the wooden cube are somewhere between gunshots and hammer blows, which only makes Merkusjev’s final outburst, where he practically loses it in emotional overload – a fascinating expressive contrast to the complete regularity in the instruments – seem utterly inevitable. The score ends with a lunga pausa, and Karlsen, as everywhere else, takes that literally, and the silence serves to bring to an end not just Symphony No. 5, not just Nos. 2 to 5, but this entire symphonic journey.
Neglect has a way of othering those who suffer from it. And it’s especially true of symphonists: Rued Langgaard the crackpot neoromantic; Allan Pettersson the perpetual depressive; Gloria Coates the obsessed glissandophile; Galina Ustvolskaya the ascetic extremist (or the more common, but no less absurd, “lady with the hammer”). Such populist caricatures as these are stupidly reductive and a lazy, misdirectional means of putting composers into ill-fitting, badly-defined boxes (which might just as well be coffins), rather than actively working to engage with, understand and appreciate their living craft.
This is an incredible album. The commitment and execution shown here are formidable, and the effect is not merely powerful and immediate but utterly cataclysmic. It’s always hyperbolic to speak of so-called ‘definitive’ performances, but where the Liss recordings (and London Musici), 25 years ago, gave a clear indication of what these works could be, the LPO and Christian Karlsen have fully realised their demands and revealed their magnitude. Rarely has a recording been so essential. Ustvolskaya’s symphonies have never sounded so vibrant, so challenging, so necessary. Аы! Господи!
Released today by BIS, Galina Ustvolskaya’s Symphonies Nos. 1–5 is available on CD and download.
