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By Olga Fyodorova
In October 2001 Moscow was playing host to a major festival of music written
by Sofia Gubaidulina where a star-studded lineup of musicians from all
around the world was adding additional luster to the event held at the
city’s premier concert venues. Visibly shaken by the grand-scale preparations,
Gubaidulina whose talent had never been really appreciated in her country,
told a news conference:
I just can’t believe someone would ever want to play my music here in Russia…
After all I’ve been through here… Not a single competition passed by without
someone pouring scorn on the Gang of Three, that is Alfred Schnittke, Edison
Denisov and me! During the 1970s and 80s we became veritable symbols of
artistic dissidence only because we thought different and wrote differently!
We wanted to break free from the never-you-dare-to-do-what-is-not-right
Soviet music system. We tried to reach out for new means of musically expressing
ourselves only to face scathing criticism and downright bans. We felt like
lepers who had sneaked their way into a high-society bash... Looking back,
I wonder just how I managed to avoid arrest and banishment… Even though
there were so many people who really liked our music apparently seeing
it as a temporary break from the suffocating atmosphere we all lived in…
And each our premier was a real celebration!
On such premiere days plainclothes KGB agents would come out of the woodwork
and, taking up stations at the entrance, kept an watchful eye on everyone
who was filing in… Meaning that our listeners were immediately put on the
authorities’ suspect list all... Back in those days people coming to my
concerts wanted more than just new music, it was their way of protesting
against the stuffy cultural atmosphere we had here under Leonid Brezhnev.
A soft-spoken and petite woman in love with all things beautiful, I suddenly
found myself in the very midst of anti-totalitarian struggle…
An ethnic Tatar, Sofia Gubaidulina was born in October 1931 in Chistopol.
She was only nine when Adolf Hitler’s armies crossed the Soviet border
at the start of four long years of bloody battles that snuffed out the
lives of about 30 million people here. The trials and tribulations, all
that pain and suffering she lived through during those terrible years inevitably
brushed off on her music…
Entering the piano department of the Kazan conservatory as an 18-year-old
young lady, Sofia Gubaidulia continued dabbling in composition – something
she started doing which she was still a kid. She was getting increasingly
serious about her old passion, which was now such an important part of
her life.
Graduating as a piano major, Gubaidulia entered the composers’ department
of the Moscow conservatory studying with Professor Nikolai Peiko who was
one of the best teachers there. The author of many excellent symphonies,
oratorios and ballets and a well-educated man of many gifts, Nikolai Peiko
was a major and even decisive influence on his young student…
Years on, Sofia Gubaidulina still admires his talent as a teacher and composer,
his intelligence and big-hearted generosity…
She never tried to imitate her teacher’s composing manner though. Nor that
of her post-graduate teacher Vissarion Shebalin who was then a big music
authority in Moscow. She always went her inimitable, one of a kind
way in music…
Never sticking to any specific trend in music, like, for example, the avant-garde,
minimalism, post-modernism or the now popular folklore themes, Gubaidulina
positioned herself somewhere between Oriental and Western art bringing
the two together. Her music ushered in profound philosophical thought,
red-hot emotions and monumental development with a simultaneous rendition
of the subtlest sound coloration of each note played…
During the 1970s and 80s Sofia Gubaidulina had established a close circle
of good friends and excellent performers, among them conductor Gennady
Rozhdestvensky, violinist Gidon Kremer, cellists Natalya Gutman and Vladimir
Tonkha, percussionist Mark Pekarsky and button accordionist Friedrich Lips…
They were devout fans all and willing to play her music wherever they could…
Touched by this selfless devotion, Sofia dedicated many of her works to
her good friends. Like, for example, the Seven Words Said by the Savior
on the Cross partita for cello, button accordion and strings she dedicated
to Vladimir Tonkha and Friedrich Lips.
Sofia Gubaidulina is certainly not the only composer to try and bring back
the Biblical story recounting the last moments of Our Savior’s earthly
life. Josef Haydn and Heinrich Schutz both produced their very own Seven
Words oratorios – monumental vocal and symphonic frescos based on the Holy
Bible. Unlike them, Gubaidulina’s effort is a fast-moving orchestral drama
where lead instruments play the role of the narrative’s central characters…
Lofty spiritual themes, attempts at finding answers to eternal philosophical
questions and a never ending quest for ethic perfection – that’s, in a
nutshell, what Sofia Gubaidulina’s music is really all about. She
often enlists the help of the great poets of the past writing music to
poems by such outstanding medieval verse masters as Khakani, Khafiz and
Khayam who inspired her Rubayat cantata which is one of the best things
Gubaidulina ever wrote…
Both in scope and profundity, it sounds more like a vocal symphony, its
Oriental score so lush, transparent and melancholic…
Western listeners discovered Gubaidulina late in the 1980s, her music leaving
the buffs in shock during a modern music festival in Boston.
Taking the Western concert-going public by storm with her unique and profound
writing manner, Sofia Gubaidulina quickly became one of the trendiest and
most performed composers around. In the mid-1990s she settled down in a
quiet village in Germany where she could churn out masterpiece after masterpiece,
which were so eagerly being awaited by performers and music publishers
everywhere…
A long-established master who has inspired a raft of monumental studies,
Sofia Gubaidulina is credited by critics everywhere who praise her womanly
grace and elegance coupled with manly logic and originality with which
she delves into global-scale themes. Her Offertorium piece epitomizes the
idea of selflessness and resurgence to a new life. In Perception she ponders
the nature of creative endeavor, and lyricism and aggression, tenderness
and roughness are juxtaposed in the Hour of the Soul piece set to poems
by the early 20th century poet Marina Tsvetayeva.
Many of her works, like, for example, Light and Dark, The Cross, Living
– Not Living, are all about the stark contrasts which our everyday life
is so full of…
Sofia Gubaidulina is brimming with energy, her life well organized and
planned out. This little woman knows full well that inspiration only comes
to the hardworking and she is working real hard creating musical chronicles
of her soul and our turbulent time...
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