Russian Resistance

Russian Resistance comes to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on Sunday, October 25, at 3 PM. It's a chamber program that brings together four Russian composers—Shostakovich, Ustvolskaya, Gubaidulina, and Auerbach—all of whom worked from very different places within the same tradition. The Fremont String Quartet handles the bulk of the afternoon, joined by Madeline Adkins on violin, Caitlyn Valovick-Moore on piccolo, Corbin Johnston on tuba, Alex Purdy on piano, and Jason Hardink on bass.

There's a lot of ground to cover in one sitting. Sofia Gubaidulina (1931–2025) was one of the first female modernists of the 20th century to reach international renown; she drew heavily on her faith and was denounced by the Party in 1979, six years after surviving a state-sanctioned assassination attempt. Lera Auerbach (b. 1973) moves between genres without calling her work 'interdisciplinary' and wrote the solo violin piece T'filah (1996) as a response to the Holocaust. Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006) was a pupil of Shostakovich who spent her career rejecting that as her only definition, and wrote a trio of liturgical chamber pieces between 1971 and 1975, including Dona nobis pacem for piccolo, tuba, and piano. And then there's Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975), whose 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets made him the 20th century's most prolific genius.

Between them, the program spans a wide range of voices and eras. The combination of the string quartet with the piccolo, tuba, piano, and bass means the ensemble can shift from the intimate scale of a quartet to the more unusual textures of Ustvolskaya's liturgical work. The organizers frame the whole thing as a study in individuality, non-conformity, and an uncompromising compositional voice.

Tickets are $40, and the concert starts at 3 PM on Sunday, October 25, at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive in Salt Lake City.