London Sinfonietta

The London Sinfonietta plays music from an extraordinary composer who resisted conforming under the ‘Great Terror’ of the Soviet Union. Galina Ustvolskaya joined the composition class of Dmitri Shostakovich at Leningrad State Conservatoire in St Petersburg, and immediately won his esteem, with the elder predicting ‘world fame’. However, the conditions couldn’t have been much worse: it was the time of ‘Great Terror’, the Soviet Union’s clamp down on any radical thinkers and artists who veered from the communist line. Ustvolskaya, writes Kate Molleson, ‘was not the only one having to weigh up the balance between asserting a creative voice and staying alive.’ Her teacher was probably the best known musical dissident of the Soviet Union and made a virtue of disguising political dissent as party-line music. The London Sinfonietta explores the extraordinary progressive work of a composer, oppressed but far from silenced by an autocratic regime. This is a story of radical resistance and musical brilliance at once.