In memoriam Sofia Gubaidulina

Sofia Gubaidulina, who died on 13 March at the age of 93, was among the most original and spiritually searching composers of our time – and one long cherished by Lucerne Festival. Born in the Tatar town of Chistopol, she studied with Dmitri Shostakovich but for years composed “for the drawer” – creating works she knew would never be performed under Soviet censorship. In the Soviet Union, her music was dismissed as too unorthodox, too experimental – nothing like the officially sanctioned “Socialist Realism.” The spiritual undercurrents that ran through much of her work only deepened official suspicion. To make ends meet, she turned to writing film scores.

Her reputation in the West began to grow in the early 1980s, when, in her fifties, the émigré violinist Gidon Kremer premiered her Offertorium to wide acclaim. A decade later, Gubaidulina herself left Russia and settled near Hamburg, continuing to compose with undimmed intensity.

Her music first appeared at Lucerne Festival in 1989, and from the 2000s onward it became a regular feature. In 2007, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Sir Simon Rattle, and the Berliner Philharmoniker premiered her Second Violin Concerto, In tempus praesens. Five years later, she returned as composer-in-residence, presenting a sweeping portrait of her work – fittingly expressing that summer’s Festival theme of “Faith.” For Gubaidulina, composing was never a craft but a calling: “Composing is always a spiritual act,” she once said.

That sense of the sacred likewise infuses Introitus, her piano concerto from 1978. Its title is borrowed from Catholic liturgy, where it makes the solemn entrance of the clergy. With this seldom-performed work – revised in 2016 in close collaboration with pianist Alice di Piazza – the Forward Festival pays tribute to Sofia Gubaidulina. The soloist is the Finnish pianist Helga Karen, who also introduces the piece in the video above.