18.03.2025 | Artist
Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who called herself “a daughter of two worlds, whose soul lives in the music of the East and the West,” has died, aged 93.
Born in Chistopol in the Tatar Soviet Republic, she grew up in Kazan, and was inherently “multi-cultural” long before the term was coined, her wider family including Muslims and Jews, as well as Christians of Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic persuasion. Earliest musical memories included her grandmother’s chanting of Islamic prayer, and in her own music she would move across a wide range of cultural reference.
At the Moscow Conservatory, Shostakovich famously encouraged her artistic independence as a composer. With Schnittke and Denisov, she was a key member of the Moscow avant-garde of the late 1960s, and from the mid-1970s, in the trio Astreja with fellow composers Victor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artemov, played total improvisation, later citing it as an important spiritual resource: “Again and again I bless this sudden idea we had of playing unwritten music. Now it is like air for me. And now it is so clear: without it, our subconscious starves. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina came to Germany, living in the rural municipality of Appen in Schleswig-Holstein, where walks in the woods prompted compositional ideas, and underlined a connection she felt to the culture of Goethe and Novalis.
Visionary intensity runs through Gubaidulina’s work and finds expression in exceptional recordings. These include Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten, played by the viola/flute/harp trio Tre Voci with Kim Kashkashian, Marian Piccinini, and Sivan Magen, a luminous composition which took as its starting point an image from Moscow poet Iv Oganov about Armenian bard Sayat-Nova: “The lotus was set aflame by music / The white garden began to ring again with diamond borders.”
Seven Words, recorded by the Münchener Kammerorchester under Christoph Poppen with Elsbeth Moser on bayan and Boris Pergamenschikow on cello is a double concerto of concentrated power, recorded at Munich’s Himmelfahrtskirche.
The Ciaccona for piano solo from 1962, which the pianist Anna Gourari, also from Kazan (the capital of the Tatar Republic), recorded for her ECM album Canto Oscuro, stands out like a monolith from Gubaidulina’s piano works. Bach, Webern and Shostakovich, says the composer, were major influences for this piece.
The album Canticle of the Sun brought together performances from Lockenhaus, with the title piece setting words of Francis of Assisi in a composition for cello, choir and celesta. The Lyre of Orpheus, a premiere recording, featured Kremerata Baltica and leader Gidon Kremer, long a supporter of Gubaidulina, in a particularly intense interpretation. “What a richness in sounds and silence!” exclaimed Kremer at the time.“ What inventiveness in the approach to the invisible! Everyone should be obliged to find keys to enter the mystical kingdom created by Sofia Gubaidulina as a sensitive reflection of higher powers. The rewards follow imminently and stay forever.”
