Delos’ recent release, 20th Century Russian Piano Music, not only features the wonderful piano playing of noted artist Vladimir Yurigin-Klevke (read more here), it also includes fantastic, in-depth album notes on each of the featured composers. We’ll share some of these here, as we feel they underscore the depth of knowledge that the artist brings to his interpretations.
Sofia Gubaidulina
Ciaconna in B Minor, 1961
While women poets have been known since ancient times, women composers have been a rarity in European culture up to the 20th century. The talent and professional mastery of Sofia Gubaidulina are undisputed; her music has won renown in her own country and internationally. Her works are notable for a broad, sweeping, large-scale character; her style is distinguished by a high artistic temperament and will power. In her creative career several periods can be singled out. The earlier period is characterized by the development of polyphonic technique and a skill in building larger musical forms (“Ciaconna” for piano solo). Impulsive rhythms combined with a somewhat dry and hard texture became a hallmark of this composer’s personal style. The creation of her individual manner required an overcoming of tonal asceticism and unfolding rich inner resources of musical sound. Gubaidulina emerged as one of those composers of the 1960s who made an energetic contribution in the renewal of the “musical fabric,” saturating it with new fresh timbres, intonations, and methods of instrumental playing. As the years passed, her music adopted one more dimension—that of expressing a struggle of contrasting sources characteristic of the European classical tradition. This type of musical structure was first tested in the cantatas written in the late 1960s— Night in Memphis and Rubayat. In the 1970s, the technique of musical development employing polar contrasts became a permanent feature of Gubaidulina’s personal style. This contrasting dramatic thinking thus asserts a new and most significant stage in the composer’s stylistic evolution.
Gubaidulina’s creative works are in many ways a reflection of the universal character of the present-day creative process, an intensive interpenetration of various cultures and, as a result, a clearly delineated awareness of typically national features in every national art, and a striving to contribute the wealth of one’s own national culture to world culture. Employed by Gubaidulina, this tendency found its expression in a synthetic merging of several artistic notions characteristic of the East and the West. This merging melds together the dynamic character of musical development and the emotional and intellectual activity characteristic of the West with an Eastern spontaneity, improvisational basis, ability for self-development, and a purely Eastern subtle, somewhat sophisticated coloristic timbre. In this very profound and organic synthesis, the oriental aspect loses its exotic tint to bring out a philosophical background filled with deep psychological meaning.
The oriental features, easily discernible in Gubaidulina’s works, can be identified in the choice of thematic material, as in the cantatas—Night in Memphis, based on ancient Egyptian lyric poetry and Rubayat, based on verse by oriental poets—Khayam, Khafiz, Khakhani. It also prevails in the pieces for three-string dombras On Tatar Folklore, in the liking for decorative-type melodics, and introduction of oriental musical instruments alien to the European tradition. Simultaneously, the signs ofWestern culture are conspicuous as well. Gubaidulina’s music is distinguished by the lyricism of her use of percussion, with the softest tones acquiring a special importance in the temple-blocks, and in its fine fragility—in the piano strokes of the cymbals, the lyrical dolce derived from the dance tambourine.
The personality of a performer occupies a special place in Gubaidulina’s creative art. In the process of composition, she orients herself towards a certain type of creative individual, scrupulously examining his personal manner of playing, the way he acts on the stage, his gestures and movements. A portrait of the performer is embodied in nearly all of her works. Gubaidulina continuously cultivates the non-tempered musical “space.” Glissando, such a favorite of hers, is nothing so much as the cultivation of the new micro-interval sphere of later European harmony.
Gubaidulina is attracted by the eternal themes of art and human life, like good and evil, life and death, moral duty. She finds them in the literature and art of various countries and epochs, in ancient Egyptian poetry, in the verses of the 14th century Persian poet Khafiz and in the works of the 17th century Czech thinker and humanist Jan Amos Komensky. However, her music is directed to present-day reality and people. The force of present-day life is presented as a novelty and a turn toward the future. Her creative art is an accumulation of the most important movements in the cultural development of the 20th century and presents a highly interesting object for studying the multiple connections between an artist and his epoch.
Also featuring Vladimir Yurigin-Klevke on Delos:
Arax Davtian: Russian Romances |