Ustvolskaya & Poulenc

Ustvolskaya: Symphony No. 5, "Amen"; Poulenc: La voix humaine

The Cleveland Orchestra / Franz Welser-Möst
Tony F. Sias (reciter), Sarah Aristidou (soprano)
A TCO Media Production TC00018


This is a disc about the human voice and about how little it needs to say. Galina Ustvolskaya's Symphony No. 5, "Amen", completed in 1989, sets the Lord's Prayer for an ensemble of oboe, trumpet, violin, tuba, wooden cube and reciter — a scoring so austere it barely qualifies as orchestration at all. Tony F. Sias intones the text with the plainness of private devotion rather than public proclamation, and the effect is genuinely disconcerting. There is a bleakness here that resists easy admiration; thirteen minutes have rarely felt so long or so bracingly strange. I doubt this is a work that yields itself on first hearing, but its singularity lingers.

The more substantial piece is Poulenc's La voix humaine, drawn from Cocteau's 1928 monologue and given here with real dramatic intelligence. Sarah Aristidou, alone on the line for the whole of one telephone call, moves through denial, hope and collapse with a fluency that never once loses the thread of the story being told. It is a punishing song — the emotional register shifts almost bar by bar — and Aristidou meets it with a voice that can turn from brittle brightness to something close to devastation within a phrase. Welser-Möst and his orchestra match her at every step, the scoring tracking each swerve of feeling with unusual sensitivity: a trilling xylophone stands in for the ringing telephone with real wit, and the string textures underneath give the whole thing an unexpected warmth even at its bleakest.

Recorded live at Severance Music Center over two nights in May 2025, the album is a disc that deserves an uninterrupted hearing — fitting, perhaps, for a work in which interruption is the whole drama. Be challenged by it.