Ustvolskaya - Symphonies 1-5
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Label: BIS
Cat No: BIS2304
Format: Hybrid SACD
Number of Discs: 1
Release Date: 24th October 2025
Contents
Works
Symphony no.1Symphony no.2 'True and Eternal Bliss!'
Symphony no.3 'Jesus Messiah, save us!'
Symphony no.4 'Prayer'
Symphony no.5 'Amen'
Artists
Oliver Barlow (treble)Arlo Murray (treble)
Barbara Kozelj (contralto)
Sergej Merkusjev (narrator)
Joonas Ahonen (piano)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor
Christian KarlsenWorks
Symphony no.1Symphony no.2 'True and Eternal Bliss!'
Symphony no.3 'Jesus Messiah, save us!'
Symphony no.4 'Prayer'
Symphony no.5 'Amen'
Artists
Oliver Barlow (treble)Arlo Murray (treble)
Barbara Kozelj (contralto)
Sergej Merkusjev (narrator)
Joonas Ahonen (piano)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor
Christian KarlsenAbout
Galina Ustvolskaya was a profoundly original composer, unrivalled in the extremism of her style, who was largely ignored during her lifetime. Fiercely independent, Ustvolskaya created highly expressive, even violent music that sounds like the work of no other composer and reveals no distinct influences, while often being imbued with religiosity or spirituality. Her music has been described as having the ‘narrowness of a laser beam capable of piercing metal’. Only after her death was Ustvolskaya’s original and uncompromising talent finally recognised.
Christian Karlsen and the London Philharmonic Orchestra present here Ustvolskaya’s five symphonies. While the First appears superficially traditional (it is the only one for full symphony orchestra), it features two boys singing – through microphones, in a chanting manner – texts that speak of poverty, racism and injustice. Symphonies nos 2 to 5 break decisively with the traditional mould; each consists of a single, rather short movement, in the manner of theatrical rituals. Written for instrumental combinations as varied as they are unusual, these symphonies became increasingly intransigent as their instrumentation contracted further and further, down to just a handful of instruments in the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. A solo voice appears sporadically, not necessarily for singing, but rather to verbalise a prayer – a prayer asking for forgiveness but not for a better life.
Christian Karlsen and the London Philharmonic Orchestra present here Ustvolskaya’s five symphonies. While the First appears superficially traditional (it is the only one for full symphony orchestra), it features two boys singing – through microphones, in a chanting manner – texts that speak of poverty, racism and injustice. Symphonies nos 2 to 5 break decisively with the traditional mould; each consists of a single, rather short movement, in the manner of theatrical rituals. Written for instrumental combinations as varied as they are unusual, these symphonies became increasingly intransigent as their instrumentation contracted further and further, down to just a handful of instruments in the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. A solo voice appears sporadically, not necessarily for singing, but rather to verbalise a prayer – a prayer asking for forgiveness but not for a better life.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 1. ♩ = 60
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2Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 2a. Ciccio
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3Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 2b. Carousel
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4Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 2c. Saturday evening
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5Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 2d. The boy from Modena
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6Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 2e. Buy jumble
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7Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 2f. Waiting room
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8Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 2g. When factory chimneys die
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9Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 2h. Sun
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10Symphony No.1 (1955–56): 3. ♩ = 108
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11Symphony No.2, ‘True and Eternal Bliss!’ (1979)
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12Symphony No.3, ‘Jesus Messiah, Save us!’ (1983)
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13Symphony No.4, ‘Prayer’ (1985/87)
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14Symphony No.5, ‘Amen’ (1990)
Europadisc Review
If you’re at all familiar with the music of Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006), it’s likely from either the Concerto for piano, strings and timpani of 1946 (a relatively neoclassical work from her student years) or the series of six increasingly hard-hitting and physically demanding piano sonatas composed between 1947 and 1988. By contrast, her five symphonies – the longest barely half an hour, the shortest just seven minutes, all incorporating voices, and often with no more than chamber forces – are rarely performed, and have seldom been recorded. A pair of separate discs issued on the Belgian Megadisc Classics label, with Dmitri Liss conducting the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra and the St Petersburg Soloists, is the only complete cycle to date. All of which makes a new complete recording contained on a generously-filled single disc on the BIS label, with Christian Karlsen conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, exceptionally interesting.
Born into a family of modest means in Petrograd (later Leningrad, and now St Petersburg), Ustvolskaya showed musical talent from an early age, and barely left her home city except for a few trips abroad in her final years, which brought her to international attention. She studied at the Leningrad Conservatory, where her teachers included Shostakovich and Maximilian Steinberg, before becoming a teacher there herself. Shostakovich admired her music sufficiently to include references to her Clarinet Trio in his Fifth String Quartet and Michelangelo Suite, but she firmly rebutted any suggestion that she had been influenced in turn by his music – or, for that matter, anyone else’s. Indeed, she was one of the 20th century’s great musical individualists, ploughing a lonely furrow in music of non-religious spirituality and living an increasingly ascetic lifestyle. She rarely composed to order, suppressing most of the commissioned works she was obliged to write during the darkest days of Socialist Realism.
Perhaps surprisingly, Ustvolskaya never fell foul of Soviet officialdom, but was regarded by many of her peers as an obstinate and eccentric figure. And her symphonies certainly comprise a unique and compact corpus, from unsettling to uncompromisingly bleak. The most ‘conventional’ of these, the three-movement First Symphony (1955–56), is scored for a large but sparingly deployed orchestra, and the parallel movement and modal inflections of its outer movements create a uniquely haunting atmosphere. It is the middle movement, however, that is most unnerving, with its texts (sung by two amplified trebles) by the Italian Communist writer and journalist Gianni Rodari on the theme of child poverty, racism and capitalist labour in the United States. Ustvolskaya subsequently stated that the poems were imposed on her (presumably as anti-US propaganda), but in the context of 21st-century inequalities, this performance (featuring the assured, often gauntly incisive singing of Oliver Barlow and Arlo Murray in the original Russian) has particular potency.
The Symphonies nos. 2 to 5 date from 1979–90, and to some extent can be seen as a set or cycle. All but the last feature texts by the remarkable 11th-century monk and musician, Hermannus Contractus (Hermann of Reichenau/Hermann the Lame) in Russian translation, and while no.4 calls for a contralto voice, the others employ a male reciter. The instrumentation of the Second Symphony (subtitled ‘True and Eternal Bliss!’) includes sextets of flutes, oboes and trumpets, as well as single trombone, tuba, piano and two drums. The wind ‘choirs’ have an organ-like quality, and the obsessive, march-like nature of the instrumental music (punctuated by thwacks on the drums) contrasts with the anguished outbursts of the spoken voice.
The Third Symphony (‘Jesus Messiah, Save Us!’) similarly makes use of instrumental ‘choirs’ (including quintets of oboes, trumpets and double basses), and again the insistent pulse movement throws the timbral polyphony into greater relief. The work’s impact is increased by the exceptionally vivid recording (you really feel the ominous thunder of the three drums, and the percussive impact of Joonas Ahonen’s piano solos). As in the Second and Fifth Symphonies, narrator Sergej Merkusjev’s delivery is impassioned and visceral, and his last, barely-whispered utterance lodges itself in the mind after the music has died away.
Subtitled ‘Prayer’, the Fourth Symphony sets the same text as the Third, but now sung by a contralto (Slovenian mezzo-soprano Barbara Kozelj). The duration and scoring are the most compact of all the symphonies (apart from the voice, just piano, trumpet and tam-tam), and again the insistence of the pulse doesn’t preclude some truly shattering sonorities. There’s something uniquely affecting about the declamatory use of the sung voice here, and while the text and musical means might suggest a kinship with the ‘spiritual minimalists’, nothing could be further from the truth: this is music of maximal impact, the closest comparison to which might be a hyperbolically condensed Messiaen.
The Fifth Symphony is subtitled simply ‘Amen’, and sets the Russian Lord’s Prayer. It is scored for narrator, violin, oboe, trumpet and two tubas, while the percussive element is provided by a chipboard cube measuring 43x43 cm. The strophic setting is the only concession to formal convention, but the combination of ardent recitation, plaintive violin figure and insinuating wind instruments shows yet another facet of Ustvolskaya’s powerfully obsessive and hard-hitting soundworld.
At close to 90 minutes in length, this excellently performed, recorded and documented album will be of the greatest interest to anyone with a fascination for Soviet music or the history of the 20th-century. A powerful, doggedly individual voice in a world often seemingly populated by -isms, Ustvolskaya at last seems to be getting her due, and this is certainly one of the most striking discs we’ve heard all year.
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