Piano Sonata No. 1

• Date: 1947
• Composer: Galina Ustvolskaya
• Period: Modern (1910-1949)

Review

"Unseen, unsought, unopened, and unsold, my poems will be savored as are rarest wines -- When they are old." -- Marina Tsvetaeva

From the beginning, Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya's music appealed to a ferocious alterity: her voice, her "message," hits the ears of a twenty-first-century listener from a parallel cosmos, where physical and temporal logics are reversed. Already in one of the composer's earliest works, the Piano Sonata No. 1, one shudders in the shadow of an immanent geometric catastrophe: musical lines become planes, planes blocks; an emptiness collects, with the fullness and weight of granite, and the bare polyphony ekes itself out with the force of stone hammers but the precision of lasers. In each of the sonata's quasi-Baroque movements, caught in tight rhythmic sheaves and veering unflinchingly between softest and loudest dynamics, one hears less a piano and more a "hammer-Klavier," a ritual of percussive conviction.

And then there in the sonata's time and tempo: it moves like all works to come, with an inertial tread which threatens to halt under its own weight at every moment, but which simply refuses to halt nonetheless. Duration is here a quarry of flinty rock, and one fights for one's next notes with each explosive blow.

But what perhaps most shocks in this sonata its time and place, at least as disorienting as its defiant physiognomy. The work was written in 1947, six years before Joseph Stalin's death. It was the same year in which the celebrated Shostakovich wrote his towering First Violin Concerto, and though both scores are vastly different, they shared the same fate -- that of the "drawer-work," composed and put away for a safer time. What amazes about Ustvolskaya's sonata, however, is how utterly, confrontationally unfit it feels for its time: atonal, evacuated of folk-flavor, brazenly inward and bleak, it appears to crush all the standards of the then-enforced Soviet Realist doctrine -- optimism, accessibility, celebratory nationalism are each countered and eradicated. Had this music been exposed to the public, it surely would have caused trouble; instead, it received its premiere more than a quarter century later in 1974.

Were these dares not already enough, Ustvolskaya's Sonata No. 1 also seems to contradict the laws of influence. Shostakovich was in fact her teacher around the time of the work's composition, and his saying to her is well-known: "It is not I who influenced you, but you who influenced me" But even such an accolade cannot prepare the listener for music which sounds in 1947 like Shostakovich's would sound only in the last decade of his life, but some 20 years earlier -- hollow but somehow emotionally over-full, imposingly severe yet psychologically brittle, austere and terribly intimate at once.

So, in a way, Ustvolskaya's First Piano Sonata is a small, humble work which manages with its modest scale to thrice turn music inside out: in the opposing non-Euclidean geometry of its surface and logic, in its utterly confrontational stance towards its original time and place, and in its echo of a music not yet written. ~ Seth Brodsky, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Galina Ustvolskaya: Complete Works for Piano
Galina Ustvolskaya: Piano Sonatas	2001
Galina Ustvolskaya: Piano Sonatas	1998
Galina Ustvolskaya: Piano Sonatas 1-6
Galina Ustvolskaya: Piano Sonatas 1-6
Galina Ustvolskaya: The Complete Piano Sonatas	1995
Ustvolskaya: Complete Piano Sonatas; 12 Preludes	1996

Previous:	Piano Sonata No. 0
Next:	Piano Sonata No. 1 "Prayer for Russia"