Galina Ustvolskaya - Grand duet for cello and piano (8 THOUSAND SUBSCRIBERS TRIBUTE)

Though Galina Ustvolskaya’s music has only recently become known and celebrated in the west, it has already gathered its share of truisms -- metaphor-stamps which now seem inseparable from the music itself. One of the more useful is the stone-simile: Ustvolskaya’s music is “hewn from granite,“ hard and unforgiving as rock; it’s got the craggy stiffness of flint and it’s as heavy as a marble slab. And, appropriately, those who love her music have already grown skeptical of such metaphors. But, confronted with a work like Ustvolskaya’s 1957 Grand Duet for Cello and Piano, one understands the impulse. The cello is Western music’s “vocal instrument“ par excellence, but here it heaves and throbs under different physical laws, more akin to bounding boulders than song. Its weight and body, its strain, is a frightening de-familiarization (to use Russian critic Shklovsky’s famous phrase) of what we’ve come to expect of this glorious instrument. Its own “v