Gallery Series
Sunday, October 25, 2026
3:00PM
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
410 Campus Center Drive
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112
Music by Shostakovich, Ustvolskaya, Gubaidulina, and Auerbach
Program
What a collection of distinctive composers on our first Gallery Series program! Ustvolskaya, Gubaidulina and Auerbach epitomize individuality, non-conformity (a trio for piccolo, tuba and piano!?) and a feminist, uncompromising fervor in their compositional voices. Shostakovich wasn’t half bad either! Featuring Madeline Adkins, Jason Hardink, Caitlyn Valovick-Moore, Alex Purdy, Claude Halter, JT Posadas, and Matt Johnson.
Allegro rustico (1963)- Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025)
Caitlyn Valovick-Moore, flute
Jason Hardink, piano
T’filah (1996) - Lera Auerbach (b. 1973)
Madeline Adkins, violin
Dona Nobis Pacem (1971) - Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006)
Caitlyn Valovick-Moore, piccolo
Alex Purdy, tuba
Jason Hardink, piano
INTERMISSION
String Quartet No. 3 in F major, op. 73 (1946) - Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
I. Allegretto
II. Moderato con moto
III. Allegro non troppo
IV. Adagio (attacca)
V. Moderato
Madeline Adkins and Claude Halter, violins
JT Posadas, viola
Matthew Johnson, cello
Performers
Madeline Adkins, violin
Claude Halter, violin
Jason Hardink, piano
Matt Johnson, cello
JT Posadas, viola
Alex Purdy, tuba
Caitlyn Valovick-Moore, flute and piccolo
Program Notes
When Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina died at the age of 93 last year, she left a void that will be difficult to fill by any single artist that isn’t her. She was one of the first female modernists in the 20th century to achieve international renown, and her eagerness to speak about her life in various interviews over the course of her long career has enabled us to know her deeply. The BBC did a wonderful documentary called “Portrait of Sofia Gubaidulina” in 1990 and, in it, she described a desperately poor childhood without toys, books, or even blades of grass to sustain her curiosity. Deprived of the comforts we all took for granted as kids, she “turned to the sky…and began to live up there.” What Gubaidulina eventually found in that expanse was religion and a lifelong desire to connect her music to her faith through scope and wide-ranging influences. In doing so, she created an expanse of her own. Shostakovich was an artist she greatly admired and, like him, she existed fitfully within the Soviet system. She was denounced by the Party in 1979 after having already survived what appeared to be a state-sanctioned assassination attempt six years before. Through it all, Gubaidulina worked hard and developed an unforgettable voice she knew would outlast her tormentors. She paid particular attention to the flute as a communicator of her ideals, writing a handful of cherished feature works for the instrument over the decades. Allegro rustico (1963) is the earliest of them, and it owes much stylistically to her connection with Shostakovich, a fleeting mentor who once encouraged her to never stray from her “own mistaken path.”
Lera Auerbach, also born in the Soviet Union and equally unwilling to be defined or confined by that fact, moves naturally between creative genres without conceding the impulse to describe her work as “interdisciplinary.” She prefers “integrative,” and she moves through her chosen art forms “as expressions of one indivisible imagination” in the making of “an artistic world that addresses the human being whole.” Sometimes, as such complete human beings, we fight. At other times, it is enough to actively remember. For her solo violin work T’filah (Hebrew for “prayer”), composed for Vadim Gluzman in 1996, Auerbach describes a piece that is “both intimate and exposed: a single human voice without accompaniment, suspended between lament, remembrance, and supplication.” She continues, “The violin line unfolds as a solitary act of witness. Its fragility is central to the piece. Nothing surrounds or protects the sound; every interval, breath, and silence carries weight. In that sense, T’filah is not only a prayer spoken in music, but also a space in which memory is held, questioned, and transformed.” T’filah was written as a response to the tragedy of the Holocaust, during which over 1.3 million Soviet Jews were murdered. But Auerbach’s note warns against seeing this piece as merely reflective. There is no detachment here. “The unaccompanied violin becomes a voice of mourning and endurance, at once personal and collective,” she writes. “The music does not illustrate grief; it allows grief to speak.”
Galina Ustvolskaya was born twelve years before Sofia Gubaidulina, but she never enjoyed even a fraction of her younger compatriot’s fame. Like Gubaidulina, Ustvolskaya had a powerful religious fervor that colored nearly every note she wrote. And like Gubaidulina, Ustvolskaya’s name is routinely mentioned today in sentences that also include the name Shostakovich. In this one regard, however, Ustvolskaya’s story is a lot more notorious than Gubaidulina’s. Ustvolskaya studied with Shostakovich at the Conservatory, and his high opinion of her music eventually took a romantic turn. She did not feel the same and, later in life, she felt the need to rebuke him entirely. Sick and tired of being described first (and often only) as his pupil, Ustvolskaya made it clear that she never felt close to Shostakovich’s music and, in fact, never really liked him all that much as a person. Ustvolskaya’s works were subject to the same expectations and scrutiny as any other Soviet composer, but she steadfastly claimed to answer to a power much higher than the Party. To that end, she composed a trio of liturgical chamber music pieces between 1971 and 1975. The instrumentation choices for each are unique, to say the absolute least. Dies irae is for 8 double basses, percussion, and piano. Benedictus qui venit is for 4 flutes, 4 bassoons, and piano. Dona nobis pacem, first of the set, is for piccolo, tuba, and piano. According to Ustvolskaya’s longtime publisher Viktor Suslin, this strange combination is not meant to “speak malice,” but rather to show us a novel path to peace by way of something “uncomfortable and absurd.”
The two great abstract measurements for a successful life in composition used to be the symphony and the string quartet. Sustained, meaningful contributions to either of these storied genres could place someone on the rosters of history, in permanent ink, but composers who made their mark on both disciplines were rare. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven come immediately to mind. Brahms maybe warrants a mention as well, but his two catalogues, though monumental, were quite brief by comparison. Mendelssohn, too. So, why not Shostakovich? With a staggering 15 examples in each category, he was no doubt the 20th century’s most generous genius. The symphonies of Shostakovich are epochal spectacles, but the quartets are, in the words of commentator Kai Christiansen, “a personal diary of poignant reactions, reflections and dark visions.”
Quartet No. 3 was premiered in 1946. We have been trained by scholars to seek sneaky ambivalence in every piece by Shostakovich. Sometimes he accommodates this obsession of ours; sometimes he doesn’t. With Quartet No. 3, we get to enjoy the former, since the inexpertly patriotic titles of each movement (“Innocent Unawareness”; “Rumblings of Unrest”; “War Unleashed”; “Homage to the Dead”; “Why and for What?”) were removed after the first concert but still occasionally used in ensuing years by Soviet ensembles in good standing. Perhaps, in the year just after the end of the War, Shostakovich was simply weary of being told how he felt about it. Thank goodness, then, that Quartet No. 3 works so well and in so many ways. Forced patriotism? Coded protest? Further proof that he is one of the 20th century’s greatest quartet writers? Yes, yes, and yes.
Jeff Counts © 2026
