"The only thing that matters is that the music played is at once authentic and strong."—Galina Ustvolskaya

Much is made of the "strength" of Galina Ustvolskaya's music: so many listeners and commentators stumble for the metaphor to match its "power," comparing it a black hole or a laser beam, conjuring images of gravitational cataclysms in the attempt to deal with its frightening might. But perhaps the sword—or the beam or pulsar—is double-edged. Listening to Ustvolskaya's single-movement Sonata for Violin and Piano from 1952, one becomes distinctly aware of strength's other side, of the tenderness and vulnerability which power always seeks to protect. The music flows by with great force, granitic and severe in momentum, bitterly unapologetic in its dissonance and unrelenting intensity. But as it moves, in the subtle fissures between notes, in the small hesitations and deathly quiet undertow, one detects an almost unbearable fragility, as if the music's potency were derived from the scope of its trauma. In its unending double-line, where the piano and violin become almost one cable-like sound-body, one begins to hear the strength of Ustvolskaya's music as the strength of endurance—the power needed to outlast its own tortuous path, to survive its own excessive pressure. One thinks of the image of St. Bartholomew in Michelangelo's Last Judgment—the saint whose punishment was being skinned alive, whose miracle was merely enduring the open air with nerves entirely exposed.

The sonata is very closely linked with Ustvolskaya's Third Piano Sonata, written in the same year. Like the solo piano work, this Violin and Piano Sonata unfolds in a single 20-minute movement, convoluting in subtle shifts which emanate with the subtle folds of a paraphrased lifetime by the score's end. Much of this effect seems to do with Ustvolskaya's almost penitent self-limiting: the work contains only the barest "essentials"—quarter notes moving with often delicate but unstoppable inertia in both instruments, a harmonic vocabulary which somehow resides in the melancholic, alienating cracks between tonality and atonality; and a fascinating series of shifts in speed. These are perhaps the most telling devices: moving between a slow amble, a clipped walk, and an almost static meditative step, they come and go in permutations. In their interchangeability they suggest different gear-speeds of a sleepwalking soul, a single unbreakable body stepping up and down into greater or lesser degrees of intensity.

But if pain seems to emanate from this journey, it doesn't seem to come directly from an immediate voice, weeping and wailing openly. Rather, as in so much of Ustvolskaya's music, the violin's tremendous expressive intensity comes from the strictures imposed upon it: the glow is pure nerve, but the object itself is ritual. When, near the end, Ustvolskaya instructs the violinist to tap her bow-end against the instrument in regular pulses, it's as if all humanoid qualities have finally evacuated. The violin has become a metronome of the spirit, purified past the point of pain, narrowly pursuing its cryptic vision.

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