Piano Sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya

Other Minds welcomed Conor Hanick for a performance of the complete piano sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006) at The Freight & Salvage in Berkeley on Monday, October 28, 2024. The performance was preceded by a talk on Ustvolskaya’s music by musicologist and 20th Century Russian and Soviet music specialist Simon Morrison.

Born in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1919, Galina Ustvolskaya’s expressive and vigorous music was deemed problematic in the USSR early in her career and did not receive widespread attention in her home country until the 1960s and 70s, and abroad only in the late 1980s. She taught at the Leningrad Rimsky-Korsakov College of Music from 1947-1977 and over the past three decades her music has experienced an increasing amount of performances and acclaim in the West. Ustvolskaya’s six piano sonatas were written between 1947 and 1988. The earlier sonatas have been compared by Alex Ross to the “static, starkly dissonant pieces” of Erik Satie and the violent, cluster-filled later sonatas, a critic once referred to her as “the lady with the hammer,” are reminiscent of the piano music of American experimentalists Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein, and George Antheil. Other Minds is pleased to be presenting a rare performance of all six sonatas as a single event in Berkeley.

Read Joshua Kosman’s review of the concert in On a Pacific Aisle.

Read Lisa Hirsch’s review of the concert in San Francisco Classical Voice.

Click the image to download the full concert program.

Pianist Conor Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old whose “technical refinement, color, crispness and wondrous variety of articulation benefit works by any master” (New York Times). Hanick has recently worked with conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Ludovic Morlot, Alan Gilbert, and David Robertson; collaborated with the San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Orchestra Iowa, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Juilliard Orchestra; and been presented by the Gilmore Festival, New York Philharmonic, Elbphilharmonie, De Singel, Centre Pompidou, Cal Performances, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Park Avenue Armory, and the Ojai Festival, where in 2022 with AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) he served as the festival’s artistic director.

A fierce advocate for the music of today, Hanick has premiered over 200 pieces and collaborated with composers ranging from Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, and Steve Reich to the leading composers of his generation, including Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, Anthony Cheung, and Samuel Carl Adams, whose piano concerto, No Such Spring, he premiered in 2023 with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony. This season, Hanick presents solo and chamber recitals in the US and Europe, including concerts at the Wallis, Cal Performances, Segerstrom Center, Stanford Live, Guild Hall, Musikverein, and elsewhere. He appears with the Phoenix and Alabama Symphonies, collaborates with Julia Bullock, Seth Parker Woods, Timo Andres, and the JACK Quartet, and premieres solo and chamber works by Tania León, Nico Muhly, Matthew Aucoin, and others.

Hanick is the director of Solo Piano at the Music Academy of the West and serves on the faculty of The Juilliard School, Mannes College, and the CUNY Graduate Center. He lives with his family in the Hudson Valley.

Simon Morrison is an archival historian specializing in 20th-century Russian and Soviet music with expertise in opera, dance, film, sketch studies, and historically informed performance. Having earned unequaled access to repositories in Russia, he has unearthed previously unknown sketches, scores, letters, diaries, official documents, contracts, financial records, photographs, and other sources related to musical life from the tsars through the Soviets. He is a leading expert on composer Sergey Prokofiev, and at present researching the career of Tchaikovsky as well as a new political biography of Shostakovich.

Morrison writes frequently for academic and general audiences. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books, he has authored feature articles along with opinion pieces for Time Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and New York Times. His biography of Lina Prokofiev, the composer’s first wife, was prominently featured on BBC Radio 4, BBC World News television, and WNYC radio. His most recent book, a history of the Bolshoi Ballet based on exhaustive archival research in St. Petersburg and Moscow, has been enthusiastically reviewed in major newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, The Guardian (UK), Wall Street Journal, and New Republic.

A sought-after speaker, Morrison has taught academic seminars and delivered public lectures in Israel, Hong Kong, China, Denmark, Canada, Thailand, the UK, Russia, and across the United States. He has been featured on national and international broadcasts (both radio and television) in Russia, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and across the United States. Recent appearances include spots on American Public Radio’s signature program Marketplace, The Current on CBC (Canada), and Start of the Week on BBC television.