Grand Duet
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Piano
- Composed
- 1959
- Duration
- 26'
- Publisher
- Sikorski
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About this piece
Ustvolskaya's largest chamber work, composed in 1959 and dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, though it waited until December 1976/77 for its first performance in Leningrad by Oleg Stolpner and Oleg Malov. Its five movements, around 26 minutes in all, are strongly rhetorical: an icy, percussive piano part, hammered repetitions and stark asymmetrical polyphony carried by relentless rhythm, with Shostakovich's shadow more audible here than in her later 'Compositions'. Its 1986 Vienna performance helped bring her music to the West; Rostropovich later recorded it with Alexei Lubimov in a recording the composer preferred.
Technical overview
Five movements of extreme intensity and stamina; sources describe hammered repeated notes, violent dynamics and asymmetrical polyphonic construction against a percussive piano part (one search summary of a Sikorski article mentions missing bar lines and a double-bass bow in the third movement, but that page could not be opened).