October 2 – save the date. A concert at Ca’ Giustinian will comprise two pieces from the admittedly small repertoire of ‘the Lady with the Hammer’ a.k.a. Galina Ustvolskaya, one of the most original musicians of the twentieth century. Ustvolskaya was born in Leningrad in 1919 and died in 2006. A pupil of Shostakovich’s, she was an artist of absolute, unassailable morality, convinced as she was that musicians were called to sacrifice their whole life to art, with no compromise with power or the moment’s fads. Thanks to these convictions, we can enjoy essential, bare music, poor in expression (hence Ustvolskaya’s nickname), though stretched smasmodically to the very core of art’s truth.
