Sabine Liebner on the Neos label is the place to go if you’re after a complete cycle of Galina Ustvolskaya’s piano sonatas (and Marianne Schroeder on hat[now]ART is top-notch too). This DVD, however, serves up a stimulating alternative – the six sonatas performed by six different pianists, recorded live at Moscow’s School of Dramatic Arts in 2011, with Alexandre Bragé’s intimate camerawork reminding you of both the brute physicality and the very specific technique required to play Ustvolskaya’s music.

This Ustvolskaya marathon was organised by the Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov. Five of his students – Olga Pashchenko, Ksenia Semenova, Alexei Grotz, Elizaveta Miller and Vladimir Ivanov – performed the first five sonatas, then Lubimov himself took to the stage for the sixth, and in his booklet-notes he suggests that the design of the stage in the Globe Hall felt satisfyingly appropriate. The stillness of the central stage, surrounded by three tiers of seats, encased within eight boundary walls, took the audience to ‘the very centre of Ustvolskaya’s sound laboratory’, he tells us.

The cramped acoustics of the space, Lubimov says, concentrate the sounds and ‘carry them upwards’ – a sonic claustrophobia that has been retained on DVD. The clangorous motor rhythms of the First Sonata’s opening movement clatter against your skull, then the fragmenting third movement – a disembodied chorale that topples into itself – tiptoes past your ears. Alexei Grotz’s performance of the manic, obsessive Third Sonata is masterful. Grotz sculpts a mighty dialogue between smashed-up scalic patterns and cushioning chorales, while managing to carry Ustvolskaya’s layered and rather idealistic dynamics: fff rubbing against pp.

Vladimir Ivanov’s performance of the Fifth Sonata creates an aural illusion that the note D flat, which is sustained through the piece, is functioning like an inverse tonic, anything that comes into its orbit made to bounce back into harmonic space like a pinball. And Lubimov’s own performance of the Sixth Sonata fights for a granite beauty within Ustvolskaya’s monodies and clusters, persuading us to listen in a new way.