ATP 023-24
Sofia Gubaidulina
Misterioso

Sofia Gubaidulina completed her education at the Conservatory of Kazan in 1954 and continued her compositional studies in Moscow with Nikolai Peiko and Vissarion Shebalin until 1963. Since then Gubaidulina has been a freelance composer. After her compositional activity was subject to constant repression in the Soviet Union, she moved to Germany in 1992 and since then has lived near Hamburg. Gidon Kremer’s commitment to her violin concerto ‘Offertorium’ in the 1980s helped her to become rapidly known in the West. She is a member of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts and the order ‘Pour le mérite’, and was awarded the Paemium Imperiale (1998), the Polar Music Prize (2002) and the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale (2013).

The first CD of this double album contains a series of compositions in which percussion is the protagonist. I was very surprised to see how Gubaidulina dealt with them, layering a complex fabric of up to seven different sets and how she then achieved unprecedented results, daring to put these sound sources together with other instruments like the organ. But this union is also the other theme of the CD, which, apart from two short piano pieces, has an original chamber music dimension, a mix of sounds that is the result of all these different elements that I described above. It is truly a new music that strikes us for the clarity of its syntactic thought and a continuous elegance of writing that has a very profound communicative value, written by a composer who will remain in the history of these decades as someone who lead the evolution of music research, the author of some true masterpieces.

Recording: Mauro Forte, Tommaso Leonetti, Francesco Frosini
Mastering: Sonoria Prato
Artistic Director: Daniele Lombardi
© 2015 Fondazione ATOPOS