Galina Ustvolskaya was born in Petrograd in 1919, educated in Leningrad, and died in St Petersburg in 2006. The name changes of her native city reflect some of the tumultuous political and social upheavals in Russian history during the course of the twentieth century: revolution, Stalinism, glasnot, to mention but three. It was amid such turbulence that Ustvolskaya lived and composed. Much has been written about her professional and personal relationship with Shostakovich, but she took grave exception to the fact that she was always defined in terms of her gender and by whom she was taught—Shostakovich. In 1994 she declared that not once ‘during my studies at the Conservatoire, which I spent in his class, was Shostakovich’s music close to me. Nor ...