Galina Ustvolskaya - Grand duet for cello and piano | Текст песни

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• Galina Ustvolskaya
• Grand duet for cello and piano

Tobias Moster, cello
Ingrid Karlen, piano
Radio Zürich 1990s

Ustvolskaya especially liked Tobias Moster's play here.

Though Galina Ustvolskaya's music has only recently become known and celebrated in the west, it has already gathered its share of truisms -- metaphor-stamps which now seem inseparable from the music itself. One of the more useful is the stone-simile: Ustvolskaya's music is \"hewn from granite,\" hard and unforgiving as rock; it's got the craggy stiffness of flint and it's as heavy as a marble slab. And, appropriately, those who love her music have already grown skeptical of such metaphors.

But, confronted with a work like Ustvolskaya's 1957 Grand Duet for Cello and Piano, one understands the impulse. The cello is Western music's \"vocal instrument\" par excellence, but here it heaves and throbs under different physical laws, more akin to bounding boulders than song. Its weight and body, its strain, is a frightening de-familiarization (to use Russian critic Shklovsky's famous phrase) of what we've come to expect of this glorious instrument. Its own \"voice\" is, as in so many other works of Ustvolskaya's, always the voice pushed too hard, forced into an extreme position. At the limits of its abilities -- which are the limits of the performer and the instrument too -- it threatens to turn into something else, to exceed its medium for the properties of another. That the new material might be stone is almost possible, though one hears in the cello and piano's near-barbaric intensity intimations of an element not yet on the periodic table.

The Grand Duet progresses in five fairly large movements: it opens in full violent swagger, with the urgency of an animal caught in a trap; following movements relieve the speed but not the concentrated, strained power. Only at the long last movement does the cello seem to \"sing\" with any of the cantabile tradition in it. But this particular affection sits uncomfortably, and eventually the monologue turns almost completely inward, the cello retreating into a single high pitch at the border of sound. The piano drops out and the cello finally expands unguarded, in cryptic cuneiform melodic blocks. As if to punish this vulnerability, Ustvolskaya brutalizes this painful introversion with fragments from the piano's loud opening music, like broken glass shattering a deepening sleep. But perhaps what makes the Grand Duet's last minutes so disturbing is their utter disconnection; they testify to a consciousness split by shock and ordeal. The cello now sings oblivious of the outside world, entirely inside itself, where its strength and durability are untouchable.

This is music which sits outside the logic we thought so native to music. But pressing in so urgently from the beyond, it's exactly the kind of perspective which keeps music alive, and which is rare in these belated, saturated times -- music as a distant witness to music, existing \"so that one may a recover a sense of life.\"

(AllMusic)

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