Remembering Avant–Garde Composer Sofia Gubaidulina

By Laurence Vittes | From the July/August 2025 issue of Strings

Sofia Gubaidulina, who died on March 13 at the age of 93, was part of a close-knit circle of Soviet avant-garde composers—including Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke—who shared a deep spiritual vision and a willingness to challenge musical orthodoxy, even under Soviet scrutiny. Like her peers, she cultivated a unique personal language rooted in religious symbolism, timbral experimentation, and a fearless engagement with the metaphysical. Born in Chistopol in 1931, Gubaidulina studied at the Moscow Conservatory and was denounced early on for her “irresponsible attitude to the principles of socialist realism”—a comment she took as a badge of honor.

For cellist Evgeny Tonkha, Gubaidulina was not just a revered figure—she was part of his musical DNA. “It’s true to say I grew up with her music,” he says. In fact, his father, Vladimir, one of the great Soviet cellists, inspired many of her works. From an early age, the younger Tonkha, who grew up on what he describes as the “tough streets of Moscow” and now lives in Los Angeles, was surrounded by her music, what he calls her “sound world of profound dualism, of suffering and light intertwined. In pretty much every piece there is dark and light—not like black and white but suffering and happiness.”

Tonkha says that Gubaidulina’s writing for cello demands sound that is not just expressive but theatrical. She would ask performers to bow on the tailpiece, pluck violently, or use metal thimbles to tap the strings—creating sounds “like a singing bowl, or a signal from a cruise ship far away,” he says.

In order to play her music, Tonkha says, “You have to let go of your ego and really be one with your music, your emotion, your intellect. If you just play notes . . . it will be really boring.” He describes performing her music as entering a meditative state. “It’s not peaceful meditation under a tree, but a journey—sometimes ecstatic, sometimes painful. When I play her music, it takes me a while to come back to reality.”

Approaching Gubaidulina’s String Works

Two weeks after her death, the city that had celebrated her 80th birthday with planned premieres and tributes, Amsterdam, hosted a concert that became an unplanned memorial. It featured her first violin concerto, Offertorium, the piece that established her Western reputation, performed by Julian Rachlin and conducted by Klaus Mäkelä. In London at the Barbican, the Australian Chamber Orchestra similarly honored her with Reflections on the Theme B-A-C-H, her darkly luminous meditation on Bach’s musical signature.

Rachlin places Offertorium among the 20th century’s most essential works, alongside concertos by Berg, Penderecki, and Shostakovich. “Despite the fact that her music was not accepted in the Soviet Union at all,” he notes, “Shostakovich greatly encouraged and supported her.” Her music, he says, is unmistakably personal and spiritual: “In her music, loneliness may have a negative taste to it, but it can also be extremely beautiful.”

Now music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of the Kristiansand Symphony, Rachlin adds that interpreting her work requires “a great conductor—someone who not only has brilliant technique but who is a wonderful musician—to bring out all the different moods and characters.” He describes Offertorium, which is based on the royal theme from Bach’s Musical Offering, as gradually dissolving and reconstructing itself, serving as a blueprint for how Gubaidulina treated music as spiritual striving: “Deconstruction not as destruction,” he says, “but as transcendence.”

For violinist Vadim Gluzman, meeting Gubaidulina was “a life-changing experience.” When he first visited her home to work on her second violin concerto, In Tempus Praesens, he immediately felt her intense spiritual presence. “The moment she opened the door,” he says, “I almost physically felt as if [I were] in an emotional x-ray.” She understood him, he adds, “not just as a violinist, but as a person—in a way few others ever had.” Her deep faith, rooted in her father’s Muslim background and her own Christianity, shaped a worldview that transcended cultural divides. “She believed that giving of yourself—physically, humanly, artistically—is what is expected of us on this planet,” Gluzman says.

Performing her music over the years, Gluzman has seen it evolve—becoming more distilled and urgent. “She began to stay longer with an emotional point, not hide it under complexity.” Still, her core language never wavered. “These heartbreaking dotted rhythms—they never left her.”

Gubaidulina loved and wrote frequently for the Russian chromatic button accordion called the bayan, often in dialogue with solo cello and strings, and her Triple Concerto for violin, cello, bayan, and orchestra gave Gluzman an even deeper insight into her architecture. “Her music constructs a cathedral of sound. If the performance is successful, you come out of it transfigured.” More than anything, he says, her music is a source of renewal. “I feel the need to be connected to her music. I feel it does good to me.”

Cellist Johannes Moser first heard Gubaidulina’s Canticle of the Sun in 1997, when Rostropovich performed it in Hamburg. “I remember being deeply impressed,” he says. Later, performing her Triple Concerto with Gluzman and bayanist Elsbeth Moser (no relation), he found her message clear but demanding. “It takes a special player and mind to fully embrace her message,” he says. “I’m not sure I was the right person to play it back then—but I knew that Vadim and
Elsbeth were.”

At her funeral in Hamburg on April 11, violinist Emmanuel Vukovich played a Bach Sarabande to connect not just with Gubaidulina’s memory, but with the stillness her music so often demanded. Accordionist Geir Draugsvoll, to whom her Fachwerk is dedicated, sought glimpses of heaven through the accumulations and aggregations of the, at times, monstrously symphonic sound in her De Profundis. And such is the paradox of Gubaidulina, that while in tone and texture her music and Bach’s seem to be opposites, both, Vukovich says, “opened celestial windows.”

For Draugsvoll, Gubaidulina’s music for bayan and strings—especially cello—is among the most spiritually profound in modern music. In Sieben Worte, he says, she staged a trinity: “the cello as Jesus, the bayan as God, and the orchestra as the Holy Spirit.” She layered timbres so thoroughly that “it is really difficult to detect which instrument is playing, and when.”

In works like Sieben Worte, De Profundis, Fachwerk, Silenzio e Rumore, and the Triple Concerto, Gubaidulina unleashes her passion for bridging the expressive breath of the bayan with the string family’s vocal soul—creating textures that shimmer with inner life. For Gubaidulina, sound was never merely sound. It was soul made audible. Tonkha says, “She told me, ‘I go to the field, I listen to the animals, to the universe. Then I begin to hear music. And when I write it down, it’s only 10 percent of what I hear.’”

He urges younger musicians not to rush. “You shouldn’t begin with her music unless you enjoy being alone. Her music demands silence, self-reflection, and the courage to step outside of tradition.” He laughs, recalling how she welcomed difference: “She could accept interpretations that weren’t what she imagined if they were done with total honesty.”

It is a mix of seriousness and play that becomes especially clear in the way she approached one of her most popular instrumental works, now known as the Ten Preludes for Solo Cello. “She didn’t really write them as finished concert works,” Tonkha explains. “They were études—challenges, almost experiments—she gave to my dad.” Though they were later formalized and published as Preludes, Gubaidulina’s inner circle continued to refer to them as the “Ten Études,” a label that preserves the spirit in which they were born: exploratory, personal, and playful. “For us, they were never about display,” he says. “They were about a kind of musical honesty, a deep conversation between the player and the material—the kind of thing she always looked for.”

Tonkha returns to her music not just for its beauty but for the reminder it offers of humility, of devotion, and of the fragile line between the seen and unseen. “Above all,” he says, “you have to let it become part of you.”

Essential String Works

Sofia Gubaidulina’s music embraces sacred mysticism, radical texture, and emotional intensity. Her key works reveal both the breadth of her imagination and the spiritual urgency that defines her voice. Across these works, Gubaidulina leads listeners to what she once called “essential time,” where sound becomes a conduit for transcendence.

• The Triple Concerto for violin, cello, and bayan breathes with otherworldly textures: the instruments sigh, groan, and exhale in shifting combinations. The bayan forms the work’s pulsating center, supported by whispering strings and occasional surges of orchestral light.

• Canticle of the Sun, written for cello, choir, and percussion, is one of her most overtly spiritual works. Using a text by St. Francis of Assisi, it moves between chant-like restraint and ecstatic outbursts. The solo cellist also performs ritualistic strikes on tam-tam and gong, embodying a kind of modern-day shaman.

• In The Wrath of God, Gubaidulina recasts Beethoven’s famous “Muss es sein?” as “No, it must not be,” in a vast orchestral tone poem railing against human hubris. Blazing brass and strings evoke divine judgment, temporarily soothed by bells and trembling harmonics, and a solo violin touches heavenly spheres.

• The four string quartets offer a more introspective exploration of the soul. Harmonics become shafts of light, especially in the Second and Third Quartets, while the Fourth surrounds the players with ghostly pre-recorded sounds.

• Both the Lyre of Orpheus and Dialog: Ich und Du explore musical dialogues between soloist and ensemble—between the self and the divine—with sparse, expressive textures and sacred overtones. 

—LV