Ustvolskaya’s Symphony No 2, Melos Sinfonia
LSO St Luke’s, London

Equality of the sexes is written into Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and the Soviet system produced several great female composers even without a feminist movement. One was Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2007), and last weekend provided an opportunity to hear her Second Symphony “True and Eternal Bliss”, written in 1979. It was given by the Melos Sinfonia, an orchestra of students and postgraduates from the UK’s conservatoires, at its unofficial base in the East End church which the London Symphony Orchestra has converted into a concert hall.

The young conductor Oliver Zeffman, a recent graduate from the Royal Academy of Music, generated considerable tension through the symphony’s twenty-minute unbroken span. His pulse was both fluid and steady as he metered the strange wind ensemble before him, six each of flutes, oboes and trumpets, one each of tuba and trombone plus a pianist and drummer.