IGNM Concert: Galina Ustvolskaya ‘Grand Duet’

Programme

Sonata No. 4 for Cello and Piano (arr.)* 1957)
Sonata No. 5 for Piano (1986)
Grand Duet for Cello and Piano (1959)

Duo
Karolina Öhman, cello
Tamriko Kordzaia, piano

With the St Petersburg-born composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006), the IGNM Zurich presents music that is undoubtedly among the most eccentric of all. Unwilling to make any concessions to the Russian state and its tyrant Stalin, she composed intense and highly expressive music entirely in secret. Her music was rarely performed; it was only late in her life that Ustvolskaya was discovered and rightly celebrated as a singular composer. The works presented here – for solo piano and in a duo with the cello, an instrument she herself played as a child – are invocations of another world. Piano Sonata No. 4 has been newly arranged by the duo, and we are hearing it here for the first time. The well-known Piano Sonata No. 5, with its insistent repetitions, is a true masterpiece of 20th-century piano literature. With the *Grand Duet*, however, we have included one of her most powerful works: this piece, lasting just under half an hour, is not ‘chamber music’, as she herself once said, for all her works are, at their core, compositions born of her own unique creative power.

The well-known duo Karolina Öhman and Tamriko Kordzaia are thoroughly familiar with Galina Ustvolskaya’s music. They will present this programme, lasting around an hour, as a special event.