The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

The belated recognition of Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) as a figure of importance tailed off once the limited extent of her acknowledged output (anything of even obliquely Socialist Realist nature rigorously excluded) had been covered on disc. Yet there was certainly a need for one that featured all three of her works for violin and piano. Kopatchinskaja – the most combative female violinist of her generation – proves an ideal exponent.

Separated by just over a decade, these pieces constitute a telling overview of the composer’s evolution during that time. Already with the Clarinet Trio (1949) there is a tendency to move away from tensile thematic development, inherited from her teacher Shostakovich, towards the starkly gestural manner that came to the fore with the Violin Sonata (1952). Here a multi-movement sequence can be discerned; the determining principle is of vividly defined motifs in constant variation – maintaining their rhythmic profile despite (or because of?) the volatile interplay of violin and piano. Formal continuity had disappeared in the Duet (1964), its half-hour span focusing on that limited pool of gestures whose initially confrontational progress reaches a peak of anguish just past the midpoint; passing into a subdued stand-off with the main motifs gradually dispersed by a silence that ultimately proves all-enveloping.

Music such as this admits of no false compromise and accordingly finds doughty advocacy in Kopatchinskaja – ably partnered by Markus Hinterhäuser and, in the Trio, by Reto Bieri. The sound has a suitably unsparing immediacy, though Paul Griffiths’s note rather risks tying the listener up in knots. Not that this prevents this disc taking its place at the forefront of the Ustvolskaya discography

(https://www.gramophone.co.uk)