Piano Sonata No. 3

• Date: 1952
• Composer: Galina Ustvolskaya
• Period: Modern (1910-1949)

Review

The same water -- a different wave./What matters is that it is a wave./What matters in that the wave will return./What matters is that it will always return different./What matters most of all: however different the returning wave,/it will always return as a wave of the sea./What is a wave? Composition and muscle...

-- Marina Tsvetaeva

Lying impossibly between the inhuman and quintessentially human, between a chill, indifferent cosmic march and an untiring individual passion, Galina Ustvolskaya's Third Sonata for Solo Piano is one her most effecting and intimate works. In its 20-minute span, yawning out over the listener like a decade of life, it never transcends the simplest techniques: it progresses all almost entirely in quarter notes and half notes; its polyphonic lines (rarely more than three) move nearly entirely in stepwise motion, though with strange and unpredictable paths, sounding like medieval chants whose contours have been slightly deformed by erosion; and the entire sonata revolves in three subtly altered tempos, shifting in permutations from a slow amble to a clipped walk to a meditatively slow pulse, like shallow breathing. It seems like an impossible formula: all these elements should fuse together into a musical landscape of unbearable grayness, a property-less parade cast in bleak un-relief.

But instead, through an imagination seemingly unpossessed by anyone but Ustvolskaya herself, the sonata becomes an entire world of subtle movements writ large, as if music's basic elements were not "composed" into a work, but simply magnified. The difference between a half-tone and a whole-tone seems vast, and the move into a new tempo feels traumatic, so profound is the work's inward force. The gravity makes the work's trajectory feel inevitable, especially as it increases in dynamic and attack until, about a fourth of the way through, it hits a gargantuan chordal wall; it returns later, only to move through the wall itself. From this point on one feels a strange, heavy transcendence at work -- not a nineteenth-century transcendence, to ever-lighter and higher states, but just the opposite: a new sensation of unrealizable weight, a blinding darkness becoming visible.

Written in 1952, the Third Sonata also comes after Ustvolskaya's decision to abandon bar-lines. Far from a merely technical decision, it seems to serve as a notational symbol for her basic state of mind: a piece comes in a single sweep, like birthed cosmos or an earthquake or a spurt of blood. It has all the unbreakable continuity associated with the strongest metaphors for spirit, and so testifies to the composer's claim that all her works after the Second Piano Sonata "are 'spiritual' in nature."

And in this way Ustvolskaya finds a kindred spirit in Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who died in 1941. Tsvetaeva's invocation of the ever-returning, ever-evolving wave, drawing on the sea's endless reservoir of strength, vibrates deeply in Ustvolskaya's sonata. And the writer's question and answer -- "What is a wave? Composition and muscle..." -- could not better describe the composer's own world-view. ~ Seth Brodsky, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Galina Ustvolskaya: Complete Works for Piano
Galina Ustvolskaya: Concerto for Piano, String Orchestra and Timpani; etc.	1997
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
Variations: Anton Webern, Galina Ustvolskaya, Valentin Silvestrov, Pierre Boulez

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