Piano Sonata No. 5

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Editions (2)

• Original
• Original

Musical Terms (3)

• Piano Sonata No. 5 (Ustvolskaya) en
  Piano Sonata No. 5, composed 1986, is one of the most extreme piano works of the 20th century. After a compositional silence of nearly three decades, Ustvolskaya returned with an even more reduced and intense language. The Fifth Sonata is in one movement of sustained ferocity, its textures almost entirely confined to dense, hammered chords at the highest dynamic levels. It represents the outer limit of what might conventionally be described as piano writing, treating the instrument as a percussion ensemble of one.
  The Fifth Sonata is physically extremely demanding: the sustained fff textures require both arms and full body weight. Practise for stamina, not just accuracy. The work should feel inevitable and relentless — any sense of the performer 'getting through it' is fatal. Ustvolskaya said of her music: it is not to be listened to, it is to be experienced.
• Ustvolskaya and austerity en
  Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) created one of the most severely reduced and uncompromising bodies of work in 20th-century music. Her acknowledged catalogue comprises only 21 works, and she was famously hostile to performances or recordings she had not approved. Her piano writing is characterised by extreme dynamic contrasts (especially fff extremes), a percussive, hammered attack, absolute absence of ornament or passage work, sudden silences as structural events, and a density of texture that pushes the instrument to its physical limits. She described her music as 'spiritual' and rejected all programmatic explanation.
  Ustvolskaya's music demands full physical and psychological commitment: there is no comfortable middle-ground. The silences are as important as the notes — they must be held long enough to register as silence, not merely as rests. The fff passages must genuinely be as loud as physically possible. Do not soften or moderate the extremes: they are the content.
• Ustvolskaya and Shostakovich en
  Galina Ustvolskaya studied with Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1939 to 1947 and again 1947-1950. Their relationship was one of the most significant and contested in Soviet musical life. Shostakovich deeply admired her work and repeatedly said so; he also made clear that he considered her music more significant than his own — a statement that some scholars take seriously and others regard as characteristic modesty. Several of Shostakovich's own works from the late 1940s show direct influence of her compositional ideas, which Ustvolskaya later claimed with some bitterness he had appropriated without acknowledgment.
  Understanding the Ustvolskaya-Shostakovich relationship helps contextualise why her music sounds so different from both Soviet mainstream music and Western avant-garde music of the same period. She pursued a path of extreme austerity and spiritual intensity that owed nothing to either Socialist Realism or serial technique — a genuinely independent voice formed in one of the most pressured musical environments of the 20th century.