The Pathétique

In this concert, conceived as a continuous journey from birth to death, two exceptional works of Russian music extend one another. For many of us, discovering the music of Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) could well be a revelation. She was a pupil of Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he himself regarded as a creator of extraordinary gifts and with whom he maintained an intense personal and musical friendship throughout his life. And she is without doubt one of the most original composers of the 20th century. Each of her works is a unique and moving attempt to create radically different music. Such is the case with her 1990 Symphony No. 5. Composed for voice, oboe, trumpet, tuba, violin and percussion, it is no exception to the rule: dark, driven by a haunting pulse, with its musical blocks unfolding around a recitation of the Orthodox Lord's Prayer before fading into an inhabited silence, it is a mystical and existential experience as much as an aesthetic one. 

The silence that closes it finds a natural echo in the opening bars of La Pathétique, in which Tchaikovsky wages a last, losing battle with the forces of Fate that have pursued him all his life. The inner conflicts of the first movement, the false waltz of the second, in which the hypocrisies of social comedy dance, and the mad, anguished race of the third, an echo of the vanity of all human activity, find their conclusion in an intense, tragic final adagio. It is in fact a prophetic Requiem: the composer would die a few weeks later in mysterious circumstances.