The afternoon concert during the Leuven Festival 20:21's thematic day 'Screams of Despair' promises to be a unique and intense experience. Both for the audience and for the performer. Young pianist Brecht Valckenaers, this year's artist in residence, tackles Galina Ustvolskaya's fifth sonata, which demands the utmost from the performer. Moreover, he combines it with a selection of preludes and fugues by Dmitri Shostakovich. Together with musicologist Elias Van Dyck, he explains why this is literally a tour de force.

Born and raised in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) liked to emphasize that she and her compositions were 'unique.' She often felt misunderstood, while simultaneously insisting that her music was 'simply incomprehensible.' Much of what musicologists wrote about her music was, according to her, simply untrue. 'I ask everyone who truly loves my music to refrain from any theoretical analysis.'

Yet Elias Van Dyck did exactly that for his master's thesis (All My Strength – Extreme Loudness in Galina Ustvolskaya's Fifth and Sixth Piano Sonatas, 2020) in musicology: analyzing her piano sonatas. Moreover, he scratched beneath the religious or spiritual layer that almost always hangs over the image of Ustvolskaya. 'Well,' says Elias Van Dyck, 'she also said that anyone who wanted to say anything about her music had to suffer as she suffered while composing. I'm not sure if I suffered enough according to her. (laughs) Her resistance may have been related to the context in which musicologists in the Soviet Union were often the mouthpiece of the regime. I primarily wanted to show that with fairly traditional means, a meaningful analysis of the fifth and sixth piano sonatas is still possible. While the Ustvolskaya reception, to my mind, doesn't go further than noting that her music is often extremely loud, and then switches to some sort of religious imagery, I tried to dig deeper.

So in the fifth sonata, he brought to light a carefully considered buildup with a symmetrical structure. In the sixth sonata, he even discerned a golden ratio. If the composer was not consciously aware of that structure and it slipped in intuitively, that only testifies to her genius.

Extreme loudness

Regardless of unconscious underlying structure, Ustvolskaya is primarily associated with 'extreme loudness'. Her nickname, 'the woman with the hammer', which she owes to several compositions that literally include a hammer in the instrumentation, is however too limiting to characterize her work. Elias demonstrates this clearly in his analysis of the fifth and sixth sonatas. For loudness proves to be a very dynamic element in the Russian composer's work, varying from a single forte to a sixfold, interspersed with soft passages as well.

What is 'loud'? Elias: 'Volume is about proportions. At a certain point you hit a physical limit, of your instrument but also of yourself. You can keep hammering away at your piano as hard as you want, eventually you reach a ceiling. And even then Ustvolskaya still makes a distinction between ffff (4x), fffff (5x) and ffffff (6x), also with or without accent, to be played espressivo or espressivissimo. Then you start to wonder what those differences ultimately mean and whether the audience can still hear them.'

Brecht: 'Although the resulting loudness is of course very important, I find the intention or mindset with which you play at least equally important. A teacher once told me that the most important difference between pianissimo and and piano is that with the first you really have to make an effort to whisper, while with the second you play somewhat more comfortably softly. So a fortissimo in decibels can sometimes be played softer than a forte, as long as the intensity with which you play it is higher. Moreover, when you press a key or play a cluster (a chord of closely spaced notes, vja), that in a lower register will sound louder in decibels due to the construction of the piano than when you press it at the same speed in a higher register. This means that passages that are 'only' fff in the lower register can still sound louder than passages in ffffff in the middle register – but the intensity in your mindset with the latter is of course many times higher.'

Torture

Playing at full force and sustained with all fingers together or with knuckles, fists, forearms or elbows: it's no wonder that when performing Ustvolskaya's work, words like 'crucifixion' and 'torture' occasionally come up. The risk of injuries (bleeding knuckles, etc.) is not excluded.

'You have to hold back when studying it', confirms Brecht. 'Playing with the knuckles of your hand really does hurt. Sometimes I wonder how much physical pain should be part of the performance. Some passages you can play even louder and with less pain when you use your fist instead of your knuckles. But don't you remove an essential element of the composition that way? It's a difficult balance. Besides, after Ustvolskaya's fifth sonata I'm playing other works at my concert in Leuven, and my fingers need to keep functioning properly. No, I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to approach it yet.'

Elias offers the young pianist little hope: 'I think the pain is part of it. The ritual, the staging is part of the performance. It's almost a performance art piece. That's why you need to experience this music as a listener live: you need to see and feel the difference between more and even more and still more. Physicality is also essential. It's music that requires all the attention of both the performer and the listener.'

Oppressive force

According to Elias, Ustvolskaya presented herself to the performer as an 'oppressive force'. The pianist is the one who must feel the pain that the composer seeks. She also had a clear image of how her work should sound and was very categorical about it. Yet Brecht is not afraid of failing to meet the composer's demands, and not only because she has since passed away.

'Of course, I've listened to recordings by Alexei Lubimov, Reinbert de Leeuw, and other pianists, but you don't imitate them. That's impossible anyway, because the final sound is merely the result of an inner intention that you can't possibly replicate exactly. Naturally, you strive for a performance that matches what the composer had in mind. But from experience with musicians playing my own work, I'm convinced that it's more important for the performer to have a general affinity with the composer's style—for instance in terms of timing or phrasing—than to play every last detail exactly as written.'

Euphoric sensation

Although the pianist is both aggressor and victim in performing Ustvolskaya's compositions, perhaps there is some consolation: the battering of the instrument can also take on a therapeutic dimension, according to Elias' thesis. 'At last the pianist can finally unleash the pent-up frustrations of years of wrestling with the keyboard. (...) The pianist derives pleasure from the almost euphoric sensation of his body working at full capacity.'

'Well put,' smiles the pianist who still faces the ordeal. 'In any case, it will be an intense experience.'

For the instrument too, Ustvolskaya's score is destructive. 'The piano can go out of tune. If it doesn't, perhaps I haven't played intensely enough,' grins Brecht. 'And since I'll play my 70-minute concert straight through without a break, that detuning will probably carry through into the subsequent preludes and fugues by Shostakovich. There will be no tuner or spare piano on standby. But I'm not worried that the audience will complain about it afterwards.'

Ustvolskaya versus Shostakovich

That Brecht opted to combine Galina Ustvolskaya with her teacher Dmitri Shostakovich makes sense. And yet it doesn't quite, or perhaps not at all.

In the essay "The Collaborator and the Recluse: Composing in the USSR", which Elias wrote for the festival, he points out that Ustvolskaya and Shostakovich (1906-1975) represent two different attitudes toward the Soviet regime and how it treated its artists. 'As the most prominent Soviet composer, Shostakovich could hardly do anything but continue to play a public role,' he explains. 'Every symphony of his was seen as a political statement. Because of that status and the lip service he had to pay the regime, he inevitably lost part of his integrity. In particular, the moment when he finally became a Party member after long hesitation was a great disappointment to Galina Ustvolskaya, who had studied with him.''From the late forties until the sixties they were very close, possibly even romantically so—that will remain a mystery. Later, Ustvolskaya only spoke very negatively about Shostakovich. The personal aspect probably played a role, but especially the fact that in her view he capitulated to the regime. Yet we must not forget that he repeatedly stuck his neck out to help musician friends, within the limited scope he had. With his music too, he wanted to prick the conscience of his fellow citizens where possible. The 13th Symphony, which was a denunciation of the widespread antisemitism in the Soviet Union, is a striking example of that.'

Unlike Shostakovich's work, Ustvolskaya's didn't achieve prominence on major Soviet stages as easily or as often. 'It's unclear whether that was because she was opposed, whether as a woman or not, or because she didn't even try,' says Elias. 'I'm inclined to think that the latter also definitely played a role. She tried at all costs to preserve her personal integrity and sacrificed her own career for it. While she went on to teach at a kind of second-rate conservatory in St. Petersburg, she continued composing.'

Cry of protest

From a Western European perspective, it's natural to interpret the loud outbursts in her compositions as 'a cry of protest against the suffocating Soviet regime,' Elias realizes. 'Yet I wonder if she would have written fundamentally different music had she lived here. The Soviet context could certainly have reinforced her desire to be left alone, but I suspect it had a more universal foundation. From her childhood memories it appears that even then she wanted to be alone, hidden under the piano, alone with the sound of music.'

If her music is an unmistakable cry of protest, then according to the musicologist it is not solely an expression of resistance against the Soviet Union and its repression. 'The yoke she seems to want to free herself from is that of society itself,' he writes in his thesis. With her loudness she wanted to 'carve out and protect her own piece of personal space against the public domain.'

Primordially Russian

Finally: was Ustvolskaya right that her music was so unique? 'She certainly had a unique voice that is comparable to few others. But music never exists completely apart from history,' says the musicologist. 'Whatever she may claim, there are always relationships with the music of predecessors or contemporaries.'

'In any case, her music is primordially Russian. You can hear the tradition of Orthodox chants echoing through it, but Shostakovich is also an important figure for that observation. Her piano concerto, an early work, bears clear traces of her teacher. But with later work you might wonder if it isn't the other way around. Shostakovich himself admitted: I didn't influence you, you influenced me. He also quoted her in his own compositions. Repeatedly he spoke highly of her: "You are a phenomenon, I am a talent."'

The theme day

Screams of Despair Festival 20:21 by offers the unique and not-to-be-missed opportunity to hear the work of both a talent and a phenomenon, performed by a talented and perhaps even phenomenal pianist. • Screams of Despair, the theme day of Festival 20:21, takes place on Sunday, October 12. Elias Van Dyck gives an introduction at 1:15 PM and also wrote a worthwhile essay for the program booklet.

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Concert 1 Concert 1 by Brecht Valckenaers at 2 PM in 30 CC.
• Also for Concert 2 at 4:30 PM, the New European Ensemble, Christianne Stotijn and Tijl Faveyts perform vocal and orchestral works by Galina Ustvoltskaya and Dmitri Shostakovich.
• In Concert 3 at 8 PM at Luca Campus Lemmens, Brussels Philharmonic performs Shostakovich's 15th Symphony and, together with Lukáš Vondráček and Andrei Kavalinski, his Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra.
• Brecht Valckenaers performs on Monday, October 20 at 8:30 PM at Luca Campus Lemmens, together with Jan Michiels, in the concert Selbstporträt mit Ligeti und Nancarrow (und Valckenaers ist auch dabei).
• An extended version of this interview also appeared on the Woman at the Piano blog.