Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025): tributes to a pioneering composer
Composer Sofia Gubaidulina died on 13 March, aged 93, prompting obituaries, tributes and homages to the great Russian composer.
Boosey & Hawkes | Sikorski pays homage to Sofia Gubaidulina, one of the leading composers of her generation, whose music drew inspiration from folk ritual, Christian symbolism, poetry, and the interaction of the spiritual with human life. She leaves behind a significant and varied oeuvre, from piano and chamber music, through concertos and orchestral works to epic oratorios exploring aspects of her faith.
International news media, music magazines, radio and websites contributed obituaries and tributes summing up Gubaidulina’s achievements:
“Sofia Gubaidulina 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”
The Telegraph
“Her Western breakthrough came with Offertorium, a violin concerto premiered by Gidon Kremer in 1981. The concerto takes the ‘Royal’ theme from The Musical Offering and fractures it into individual notes dispersed around the orchestra, demonstrating the dual influences of Bach and Webern. The religious and ritualistic connotations of the title and also indicative: like many in Soviet Russia, Gubaidulina adopted the Orthodox faith in the 1970s, despite the state repression, and it would go on to inform all her later work.”
Gramophone
“She explored the tension between the human and the divine, and sought to place her music in the service of religion in the literal sense of repairing what she believed to be the broken bond between man and God. Using musical terms, Gubaidulina often spoke of her work bringing legato, a sense of connected flow, into the fragmented ‘staccato of life’.”
New York Times
“She viewed herself as a musical gardener rather than an architect. “There are composers who construct their works very consciously; I am one of those who ‘cultivate’ them,” she said. ‘And, for this reason, everything I have assimilated resembles the roots of a tree, and the work its branches and leaves’.”
The Times
“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.”
The Guardian
News media coverage (some may have paywalls or geoblocking):
The Guardian
The Telegraph
The Times
Financial Times
New York Times (Obituary)
New York Times (Appreciation)
Washington Post
Die Welt
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Limelight
Gramophone
NPR
BBC News
Bachtrack
Presto Music
For further information on Sofia Gubaidulina and her music visit www.boosey.com/gubaidulina
Photo: F Hoffmann/La Roche Ltd