Grand Duet

The life of Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) is intimately linked with St. Petersburg, the city of her birth, education, professional experiences, success and privation, and ultimately her death. Not surprisingly, the influence of Dmitri Shostakovich looms large in her early work. She was one of Shostakovich’s most gifted students at the Leningrad Conservatory during the war years. Like Shostakovich, Ustvolskaya often created music merely to survive. On scores written for officially sanctioned Soviet projects, she would write “for money” as a daring confession that such music was not integral to her aesthetic. Scientific terms have been used to convey some sense of her searing, rigorous style. Described as having the focal power of a laser beam piercing metal, her music has also been said to emanate from the “black hole” of the repressive Soviet world.
The Grand Duet for cello and piano took shape in 1957. The cello, Ustvolskaya’s primary instrument during her teenage years, largely forgoes its lyrical abilities in favor of emotions and gestures pushed to their extremes. One is not wrong to sense that the expressive severity projected in the first movement genuinely captures the composer’s inner struggle, the struggle to express her individual nature and emotional richness in a society where such introspection was painfully discouraged.

(c) Jason Stell