(Programme note written for the BBC Symphony Orchestra concert at Barbican Hall, Friday 17 February 2023)
Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), Symphony No. 1 (1955)
I – Part 1
II – Part 2 – Ciccio
III – Merry-go-round
IV – Saturday Night
V – The Boy from Modena
VI – “We take your junk!”
VII – The Waiting Room
VIII – When the Factory Chimneys Die
IX – Epilogue – The Sun
X – Part 3
Galina Ustvolskaya’s music tends towards extremes: contrasts of tempo, dissonance and especially maximal dynamics abound throughout her music, prompting one critic to label her ‘the lady with the hammer’. She certainly found her own individual style, incorporating block-like shifting harmonies, clashing clusters of notes, and a strong focus on repetitive percussion, as well as texts that emphasise an unorthodox spirituality. She regarded her compositional technique ‘to be completely new, individual, and not amenable to theoretical analysis’.
Her chromatic and often aggressive music was not widely accepted in the Soviet Union until the mid-1960s, when state control over performances began to relax and a new level of experimentalism was begrudgingly accepted. While Soviet music may be well known for state control and intervention (with Shostakovich being the most famous case), the cultural climate after Stalin’s death shifted to allow for increasingly greater degrees of musical experimentalism and by the mid-1960s, a burgeoning avant-garde had developed in Soviet music. While Ustvolskaya remained on the periphery of this younger group of composers, her music was increasingly celebrated in the new climate of experimentation and came to be celebrated in its own way.
Ustvolskaya’s First Symphony was written in 1955 but only premiered in 1966, and then only published in 1972 – a measure of the delays for performance and publication that Ustvolskaya endured throughout the majority of the Soviet era. The piece is scored for orchestra and two boy sopranos; Ustvolskaya’s distinctive approach to orchestration is evident throughout, with a Stravinsky-like emphasis on woodwinds and brass favoured over strings. The central eight movements set poems by Gianni Rodari, an Italian children’s author and journalist for a communist newspaper. The texts criticise the injustices of life in the United States from a socialist perspective. Ustvolskaya would later try to distance herself from these texts, even claiming that they were not her choice, and writing that the work was about ‘the West’ in general, rather than the United States specifically. Whatever the motivation, her music goes about depicting the horrors covered in Rodari’s texts.
The first movement opens with weaving chromatic lines in the woodwind that slowly immerse us into Ustvolskaya’s musical language, where dissonance blends freely with textural innovation, such as note clusters in the timpani. The singers enter in the second movement: Ustvolskaya takes a similar approach for all of the song-settings, alternating suspended chromatic chords with agitated and angst-ridden sections. In a musical sense, we hear the trauma recounted in the text restaged in its accompaniment. The central eight movements set Rodari’s texts, with movements that criticise (in turn): child abuse, Jim Crow segregation laws, poverty resulting from low pay, children rendered orphans after gun violence, homelessness and terminal illness, unemployment, factory closures, and (in the final poem) industrial pollution that blots out the sun. The final movement frames this parade of nightmares with an instrumental conclusion pervaded by sighing gestures.
In the years following the symphony’s premiere and publication, Ustvolskaya tried to disown the piece as an early work, and she only belatedly allowed it to be included in her publisher’s list of her works. She annotated her original manuscript with the words ‘stronger text needed!’ and insisted that the piece’s meaning was not exclusively defined by its text. She even claimed that she had included the boy soprano parts for their timbral interest, rather than for the function of setting the texts. The Symphony’s inclusion in her accepted list of mature works perhaps acknowledges the unity of her musical language across her life, heard here in prototypical form, with more than a passing resemblance to Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Les Noces. Frans C. Lemaire described Ustvolskaya as a ‘priestess of negation’: in her First Symphony, we hear Ustvolskaya condemn the abuse of children through stark textures and grim depiction that calls into question the very function of the ‘choral symphony’ as a genre.
Daniel Elphick is a Lecturer in Musicology at Royal Holloway, University of London, writing on Russian and Soviet music. Daniel’s first book, Music Behind the Iron Curtain is available from Cambridge University Press.
(readers can find the full programme booklet online here)
Daniel Elphick 