So long, with Gubaidulina

So long, with Gubaidulina

Orchestras

norman lebrecht

October 24, 2021

The fascinating Russian composer is 90 today.

Sonce leaving the collapsing Soviet Union around 1990, she has lived quietly and productively in Hamburg, where Alfred Schnittke preceded her and her published was based. The music she writes fits into no single category – modern but ethereal, precise and borderless.

Happy birthday, Sofia, and many more.

A birthday greeting (with a kind of name-check: you either get it or your don’t)

Comments

  • Rob Keeley says:

    A composer whose music and enormous reputation I have never been able to get. But I’m glad there are lots of people who do!

    • John Borstlap says:

      I never got it either but I’m happy it’s a woman, for a change, so it must be good for the experts who can hear those things.

      That Offertorium thing my dentist is fond of and he plays it during treatment over the speakers, I found it a very frightening experience!

      Sally

    • HugoPreuss says:

      I am among the people who do. Love her music, both intellectually and emotionally. Tonight will be a Gubaidulina evening for me. Happy birthday!

    • Nijinsky says:

      I would be disingenuous would I say that I don’t get it. At least would I not put forth that I think maybe I do, just to be honest. She caters to a time where distress seems to be worshipped, like so many “modern” artists or composers, that when they feed the populace with a mirror of the distress and anxiety this society creates people have ANOTHER excuse to go for another consumption available at the supermarket or upper class delicatessen or wherever, and not really deal with the superficiality of the society.

      Unsuk Chin another, who either sounds stressed, distressed or to me evokes the disorienting careless array of consumptions available via different flippant effects.

      In Mozart’s time there was Anfossi, and others https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYyVwGVJTQs
      Also maybe nothing more than the pretense of a fabricated society, then trying to look ordered, and now in these times glorifying the distress that it [such “society”] causes as some sort of deep psychological awakening.

    • Nijinsky says:

      I guess I just find her music a bit formulaic, but what’s worse is when “someone” starts pumping on about THEIR formula, listing every part of the machinery that they believe is the only factory where “art” can be made, like ideological wars in fundamental religions. THAT Gubaidulina doesn’t do.

    • Karl says:

      They play a lot of her music in Boston. They played her The Light of the End last week. At least it’s better that Eliot Carter.

    • Nijinsky says:

      After having to listen to this kind of “modern” music for half a century, and mostly thinking it’s some acquired taste I just haven’t gotten enough involved with, I have to finally say I find it elitist, I find it inaccessible, I find it part of the reason Classical Music is losing its audience; and there are MANY MANY MANY people who feel the same way, they are simply too intimidated to speak out. MANY MANY people who have stayed faithful to classical music and yet have had to sit through concert after concert wondering why nature’s amazing overtone series that can sustain melodies that are sung all over the planet, WHY that is limited to a sort of dissonance that only allows for the same sterility and APATHY and aggressive disconcern that a CEO uses to yet again destroy whole acres of the rain forest because of calculations of $$$$$$, and the exploitation of human beings as commodities in a consumer ordered market that only wants to make them addicted, or the romanticizing of apathy when people have made themselves addicted to such. The same aggressive indifference I hear when someone comes by with their car stereo turned up so loud one only hears low thudding basses as if a digger truck is plowing through the rain forest, all for stimulant.

      I don’t get it, and other people have actually GONE into the backstreet, and the hidden places, and the suppressed ghettos of society and seen such despair, and instead of “glorifying” it with impotent art, have met it with empathy and a warm heart.

  • John Borstlap says:

    I found her utterly original idea, in one of her pieces, of having the conductor performing a short solo while the players stayed silent, typical of a kind of spirituality where the audience has to imagine things that are not there.

    The gestures of the conductor’s solo have to demonstrate the presence of the imagination, so to speak.

    Even my PA could ‘write’ such a solo, and that really says a lot.

    Mrs Gubaidulina’s music invites for projection rather than perception, in my humble opinion. If you attentively listen to the music and forget the wrapping paper, there is not much to listen to, but a lot of gestures, combining a naive mindset with over-the-top pathos that doesn’t know any bounds. Here, for instance, she informs us about God’s opinion about humanity, no less:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkG8rYIZNI4

    Out-shosting Shostakovich….. as if Shos was not enough.

    • Stephen M. Baraban says:

      Or out-Liszting-Liszt?…Thanks for linking to this extraordinary piece, Mr. Borstlap, even if you don’t like it.

  • E says:

    The piece was written for Kremer, with his style providing inspiration for gestures in the composition.
    It fits him perfectly, like a glove to a hand, and the playing is
    exceptional.

  • Baffled in Buffalo says:

    Can you change the ‘authorship’ of my above comment to my psuedonym, “Baffled in Buffalo”, please. Sorry, I thought that was automatic. Baffled/Stephen Baraban

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