Latest news with #SofiaGubaidulina
ABC News
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Pokey LaFarge takes us to Rhumba Country, and the radical spirituality of Sofia Gubaidulina
Credited with 'making riverboat chic cool again', Pokey LaFarge brings his band in live to the Music Show studio. Pokey talks to Andy about how old Black gospel, his Christian faith and working on a farm have all influenced him on his latest album, Rhumba Country. Oľga Smetanová joins Andy to remember the composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died at the age of 93. Gubaidulina's music has been described as 'holy modernism', which was a powerful provocation in the Soviet Union of her early career. The theological and musicological throughlines of her composition paint a dramatic picture, which Ol'ga reflects on with her knowledge of the woman herself. Pokey LaFarge is on tour around Australia in May: 8 - The Croxton, Melbourne, VIC 9 - Barwon Heads Hotel, Barwon Heads, VIC 10 - Meeniyan Town Hall, Meeniyan, VIC 13 - Princess Theatre, Brisbane, QLD 14 - A & I Hall, Bangalow, NSW 15 - Liberty Hall, Sydney, NSW 16 - The Gov, Adelaide, SA 17 - Freo Social, Perth, WA Music played live in The Music Show studio by Pokey LaFarge: Fine to Me (from In the Blossom of Their Shade) So Long Chicago (From Rhumba Country) In the interview with Ol'ga Smetanova: Title: Offertorium Artist: Gidon Kremer (violin), Boston Symphony Orchestra/Charles Dutoit Composer: Sofia Gubaidulina Album: Offertorium Label: Deutsche Grammophon Title: Seven Words; iv. 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' Artist: Maria Kliegel (cello), Elsbeth Moser (bayan), Camerata Transsylvanica Composer: Sofia Gubaidulina Album: Seven words/Silencio/In Croce Label: Naxos Title: Am Rande des Abgrunds (At the Edge of the Abyss) Artist: Julius Berger, Sofia Gubaidulina, Viktor Suslin, Niklas Eppinger, Aleksandra Ohar, Diego Garcia, Yoonha Choi, Yoon-Jung Hwang, Tai-Yang Zhang Composer: Sofia Gubaidulina Album: Am Rande des Abgrunds Label: Wergo Title: The Canticle of the Sun; iv. Glorification of Death Artist: Nicolas Altstaedt (cello), Andrei Pushkarev (percussion), Rihards Zaļupe (percussion), Rostislav Krimer (celesta), Chamber Choir Kamēr/Māris Sirmais Composer: Sofia Gubaidulina Album: The Canticle of the Sun Label: ECM At the end of the show: Title: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major Artist: Cédric Tiberghien (piano), Les Siècles/François-Xavier Roth Composer: Maurice Ravel Album: Concertos Pour Piano Label: Harmonia Mundi The Music Show was made on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, Gadigal and Gundungurra Country Technical production by Tim Jenkins and Brendan O'Neill
The Guardian
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sofia Gubaidulina obituary
When the composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died aged 93, began to include overtly religious ideas in her concert music, it proved a provocative step to take in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union of the late 1960s. These ideas were expressed through titles and a kind of dramaturgy that she called 'instrumental symbolism'. Switching from one instrument to another, or between different parts of the same instrument, she suggested extra-musical and even theological ideas, rather like an acoustic equivalent of the geometrical distortions and symbolism familiar from the icons of the Eastern Orthodox church that she loved so much. With works such as Introitus (1978) for piano and chamber orchestra and In Croce (1979) for cello and organ, she acquired a reputation in the world of non-official Soviet culture, inspiring for enthusiasts but irritating to the old guard of the Composers' Union. She refused to be intimidated. The violinist Gidon Kremer took the concerto Offertorium (1980) to orchestras abroad, and Gubaidulina's music began to feature in concerts and festivals around the globe. Commissions followed, such as Alleluia (1990), for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and and vocal forces conducted by Simon Rattle; the Viola Concerto (1996), for Yuri Bashmet and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and the violin concerto In Tempus Praesens (2007), for Anne-Sophie Mutter. In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina moved to Appen, a village outside Hamburg, in Germany, seeking the peace and quiet that seemed to have gone from Moscow. There she spent the last three decades of her life, composing in every medium that fascinated her, from vast oratorios to the tiniest pieces for solo double bass or unaccompanied voice. As she grew older, her deep and emotional mysticism, rooted in her passionately held religious convictions, became ever more concentrated and fiercely eschatological – concerned with the end of history and the world – in tone. However, in every piece she always seemed to begin anew. She delighted in treating every new day of her life as an opportunity to search for something fresh and undiscovered and she was never afraid to take artistic risks, as with In the Shadow of the Tree (1998) for Japanese solo instruments and orchestra, and The Wrath of God (2019), for orchestra. Gubaidulina's music reflects and embodies her unquenchable lifelong devotion to artistic freedom: not merely the freedom of composers to write what they write, but the freedom of performers to play what they play ('in joy', as she used to put it, with a childlike smile), and the freedom of every listener to hear what they hear, and not what someone else has told them to hear. Born in Chistopol in the Tatar Republic of the USSR, midway between Moscow and Kazakhstan, Sofia was the youngest of three sisters. She grew up in the Tatar capital of Kazan, on the river Volga. Her mother, Fedosia (nee Elkhova), was a schoolteacher of mixed Russian-Polish heritage, and her father, Asgad Gubaidulin, a land surveyor, from a Tatar family. Both were strong supporters of the communist order and Soviet values. Sofia was especially devoted to her father, though he could accept neither her choice of career nor her religious beliefs. She recalled him talking quietly in the Tatar language with his friends (she never learned it, as the family spoke Russian), and of accompanying him into the countryside on his work where his long silences, she said, 'taught me how to listen'. Gubaidulina's elder sisters were musical and there was a small grand piano at home. When her own lessons began, she made swift progress. Disliking 'the impoverished little pieces' she was given to study, she quickly taught herself to improvise, a skill that remained of lifelong importance; relief came when her teacher introduced her to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. The household was atheist, but while still small, she saw an icon in someone's home – 'and I recognised God'. She was proud that her paternal grandfather, Masgud Gubaidulin, had been a mullah and she kept on her desk a photograph of him in his turban, though she had no memories of meeting him. After five years of undergraduate study at the Kazan Conservatory, in 1954 she moved to the postgraduate course at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where her teachers included Nikolai Peiko and Vissarion Shebalin, both unusual composers. On one occasion, when one of her examiners publicly criticised her 'mistaken path', another, Dmitri Shostakovich, quietly told her to 'continue on your mistaken path'. She was admitted to the Union of Soviet Composers in 1961 and finished graduate studies two years later. At the tail end of the Khrushchev thaw, Moscow was a cauldron of new artistic ideas. With her contemporaries, who included the composers Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, from Estonia, and Valentin Silvestrov, from Ukraine, she was fascinated by everything she could lay her hands on from the musical and intellectual world beyond: 'In the west, information and recordings and scores were easy to come by, so you could take it for granted you would always find it later. But for us every scrap of information was precious, so we threw ourselves on it hungrily.' Most inspiring for her were her encounters with European religious music of various kinds, and her first impressions of 20th-century modernism, whether in the form of Webern, Berg and Stravinsky, or the later 'avant-garde' generation of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Iannis Xenakis. Through a friend she also discovered the instruments and sounds of various indigenous cultures, especially those of the far east of the USSR. Even from early on there were hints of what was to come: a certain purity of sound and a fondness for ecstatic incantation. The Soviet Union supported a huge cinema industry, which provided employment for composers. Gubaidulina's output of movie music was prolific. She worked at enormous speed, noting: 'I write film music for six months, take a month off to recover my health and then write my own music for the rest of the year.' Though she scored many kinds of films, ranging from the teen drama Chuchelo (Scarecrow, 1984) to The Cat That Walked By Herself (1988), she was especially proud of her music for children's cartoons. Film music was not subject to the same political controls as concert music and popular music, and proved a good place to experiment and learn discipline. Of her encourager Shostakovich she observed: 'He could make the deepest darkness shine with the brightest light!' The same could be said of the music with which she found her distinctive voice. I first met her after arriving as a graduate student in Moscow in 1984, at a concert of electronic music where her Vivente – Non Vivente (Alive and Dead, 1970) was played. She was immediately open and warm. In 1956 she married Mark Liando, a geologist and poet, and they had a daughter, Nadezhda. The marriage ended in divorce, as did her second, to the mystic and dissident Nikolai, later Nicolas, Bokov. In the 90s she married the pianist and theorist Pyotr Meshchaninov. He died in 2006; Nadezhda had died two years earlier. Gubaidulina is survived by two grandchildren. Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, composer, born 24 October 1931; died 13 March 2025
BBC News
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Russian music great Sofia Gubaidulina dies in Germany at 93
Legendary avant-garde composer Sofia Gubaidulina has died in Germany, where she spent more than 30 years of her life after the break-up of the Soviet who was 93, was one of a group of composers blacklisted in the Soviet Union in her work eventually reached the West, where she was feted for her fusion of modern music with spiritual and religious was born in Chistopol in Tatarstan in October 1931 into a Russian-Tatar family soon moved to Kazan in southern Russia where she studied music, before moving to the Moscow Conservatoire in 1954. Although the great Dmitry Shostakovich had already been dismissed from the Conservatoire, his former assistant Nikolai Peïko introduced her to the works of Mahler, Stravinsky and soon spotted her talents and told her that she could follow her own "incorrect path", however misguided it might compositions were condemned by the Soviet system and her work was banned in the 1960s and was one of three legendary, avant-garde Russian composers to be disgraced, along with Schnittke and Denisov."We were all very different artists," she told the BBC in 2013. "Edison Denisov was a classicist with very subtle yet strict logic. Alfred Schnittke was a romantic. My style could be best described as archaic."It was only when by chance she shared a taxi in Moscow with violinist Gidon Kremer in the late 1970s that her life changed. He suggested that she write a violin concerto, and it was this composition, Offertorium, in which she borrowed a theme from Bach, that gave her an international following in the West, after it was premiered by Kremer in Vienna in praised the work as "perhaps the most important violin concerto of the 20th Century".The Union of Soviet Composers blacklisted her in 1979, condemning her and six fellow composers for writing "pointlessness... noisy mud instead of musical innovation".She was first allowed to travel to the West in 1984, for a festival in the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Gubaidulina moved to an unassuming house in the quiet village of Appen near Hamburg in northern Sir Simon Rattle spoke of her as a "flying hermit", always in orbit and only occasionally visiting Earth."It's very tempting to set up rules," she once said. "They very quickly get hopelessly out of date."
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sofia Gubaidulina, composer who flourished despite the tyranny of the Soviet regime
Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died aged 93, believed that it was Soviet repression which made her so powerful and distinctive a composer, though it was only after the fall of Communism that she became well known in the West; her music came as a revelation and established her, alongside Alfred Schnittke, among the most substantial and significant of the generation of Russian composers to have succeeded Shostakovich. She went on to win large-scale commissions from orchestras in Europe, America and Japan, becoming, in her 70s, one of the most sought-after composers in the world. Her works include symphonic and choral works, two cello concertos, a viola concerto, four string quartets, a string trio, works for percussion ensemble, and many works for unconventional instruments and combinations of instruments. In an interview broadcast on BBC2 in the early 1990s, Sofia Gubaidulina explained that the repression of the Stalin and Brezhnev years had been an advantage for Soviet artists of her generation: 'If you cannot lay your hands on information – this book is forbidden for some reason, that piece of music restricted – when by some miracle you do manage to get hold of something, you throw yourselves upon it with an intensity probably not even dreamt of by the person who has everything,' she said. Perhaps even more surprising than the fact that Sofia Gubaidulina was able to compose at all was the fact that the contemplative, often overtly religious tone of her compositions offered such a challenge to the official atheism of the Communist state. One of her greatest achievements, The Seven Words (1982), a chamber concerto for cello, accordion and string orchestra, was inspired by the seven last words of Christ and embodied the New Testament drama with disarming literalness, the different instruments representing Christ's body and soul. Such works did not endear her to the Soviet musical establishment. During her studies at the Moscow Conservatoire, her music was labelled 'irresponsible' by the authorities for its exploration of unorthodox tunings, and in 1979 she was blacklisted by the Union of Soviet Composers for her unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet music in the West. One reviewer felt that she seemed to be 'going overboard in pulling every trick in the book as a two-fingered salute to authority'. But Sofia Gubaidulina, a diminutive, self-effacing woman, hardly fitted the dissident stereotype and never saw herself as political. 'It may have been a kind of protest for some,' she told an interviewer, 'but for me religion is the basis of all art.' Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina was born on October 24 1931 in the Tatar republic of the Soviet Union. Her mother was of Russian-Polish-Jewish extraction. Her father, a land surveyor, was a Tatar, an atheist whose father had been a mullah. It would be tempting to ascribe her development as a composer to youthful rebellion. Her father never approved of his daughter's interest in music, or her habit of going out into the fields to pray. Yet the ethereal mysticism of Sofia Gubaidulina's music clearly stemmed in part from her roots. She once described herself as 'the place where East meets West', and was proud of her Tatar ancestry. She studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatoire, and then at the Moscow Conservatoire with Nikolai Peiko and, after graduation, with Vissarion Shebalin. By the time she arrived at the Conservatoire, Shostakovich had already been dismissed from his professorship, yet he still dominated the musical environment. Peiko had been Shostakovich's assistant and took her to meet him, with a symphony on which she had been working. His advice – 'Be yourself. Continue writing in your own, incorrect way' – inspired her for the rest of her life. Though she cited Bach and Webern as her main influences, she admitted her debt to Shostakovich with an early piano quintet (1957), whose driving rhythms and deft counterpoint showed the master's influence. After graduating, she scratched a living writing film music, which gave her opportunities for experimentation that she would not have had with more conventional musical structures. In the mid-1970s she founded Astreja, a folk-instrument improvisation group which enabled her to develop her interest in rare Russian, Caucasian, and Asian folk and ritual instruments. She had a special fondness for the bayan, a Russian folk accordion for which she wrote a concerto, Under the Sign of Scorpio. Her works also include a quartet for percussion and saxophone and a piece for Japanese koto and Western orchestra. Though her more serious music was ignored by the Soviet establishment, she was championed in Russia by a number of performers, including the cellist Vladimir Tonkha, the bayanist and accordionist Friedrich Lips, the percussionist Mark Pekarsky, and bassoonist Valery Popov. Her fortunes began to change with the first major performance of her music in the west, when in 1981 Gidon Kremer played Offertorium, her astonishing violin concerto based on the Royal Theme from Bach's A Musical Offering, in Vienna. Success in the 1990s enabled Sofia Gubaidulina to move from her tiny Moscow flat and buy a modest house near Hamburg. The summit of her life's work was a massive two-part millennium commission, The Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ according to St John, heard at the Albert Hall in the 2002 Proms. Scored for gigantic vocal and orchestral forces, the piece interweaves lines from the gospel narrative with passages from the Book of Revelation and Ezekiel. Other important pieces include Nadeyka, a triptych written in memory of her daughter, who died of cancer in 2004, and The Light of the End, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She was thrilled when the work preceded Beethoven's Symphony No 9 at the 2005 proms. Sofia Gubaidulina received numerous prizes including the Living Composer Prize of the Cannes Classical Awards in 2003, and her works are well represented on disc. Sofia Gubaidulina was married three times. Sofia Gubaidulina, born October 24 1931, died March 13 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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