Galina Ustvolskaya is a Russian composer born in 1919 and still living today (2008) in Petrograd as a recluse. One of her teachers was Shostakovich (who actually asked her to marry him at one point) and his influence is strongly felt in her music. This concerto, written when she was 27, is romantic in style, tonal, with a high degree of emotion in it's use of violent outbursts followed by quiet, peaceful moments. It is built around an obsessive short-long rhythmic motif, which at the end, returns to it's bare essentials in a repetitive, forceful, grandiose declamation of itself, that is quite striking. The cd also contains great renditions of Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony in F, and a piano concerto by Galynin, another composer who studied under Shostakovich.

Jean-Yves Duperron