★★★★☆
The first thing anyone learns about Galina Ustvolskaya is that her composition teacher, Dmitri Shostakovich, asked to marry her in the early 1950s. She rejected him, saying once that “he killed my best feelings”. He remembered her warmly enough, however, to quote a trio of hers in his fifth string quartet, and again in the late Michaelangelo Suite.
That was the closest Galina came to a fame she never sought. She taught music for thirty years at the Leningrad Conservatory, lived alone and let no-one into her apartment. Her works were of a religious character, unacceptable to the Soviet authorities. After the collapse of Communism she attended a few performances, which left her unsatisfied. She died, aged 87, in December 2006.
She wrote five symphonies. Those numbered 2 to 4 contain texts by an eleventh-century monk and titled “True and Eternal Bliss”, “Jesus Messiah Save Us” and “Prayer”. They are bleakly devotional, hammering home her Orthodox faith with heavy bursts of percussion. It gets a bit wearing after a while. The fifth symphony, titled “Amen”, is a setting of the Lord’s Prayer in Russian. It takes 13 minutes and is her last completed work, contemplative but still raging.
The outstanding work here is her first symphony, dated 1955-56, an altogether original concept from start to finish. Using polemics about child labour by an Italian communist writer, Gianni Rodari, it takes a slow tread though an abyss of human misery, elevated to a transcendent degree in the second movement by the unbroken voices of two boys, describing an oppressive world.
Ustvolskaya claimed she had been forced to set these texts but there is no escaping her fury or her compassion. The symphony demands to be heard live in a concert hall. The London Philharmonic Orchestra recorded it in a rehearsal room, conducted by a Swede, Christian Karlsen. The sound engineer, Dave Rowell, does brilliantly. The boy trebles, Oliver Barlow and Arlo Murray, deserve a big bag of sweets. Will the LPO ever be able to afford a live performance?
