Sofia Gubaidulina Visits BSO, NEC

February 15, 2017

Composer will receive NEC honorary degree at the last of three events celebrating her music, and will hear BSO premiere of her new concerto.

A tribute concert for renowned Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina to be held on February 27 in NEC’s Jordan Hall concludes a week of events led by the premiere of Gubaidulina's new Triple Concerto for violin, cello, and bayan with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Yesterday, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Contemporary Music was added to Gubaidulina's many honors, citing "the exceptional range of quality of her music."

2017-02-23 Sofia Gubaidulina: "Do You Hear What I Hear?"
2017-02-23 BSO premiere of Gubaidulina's Triple Concerto
2017-02-24 Piano Seminar: Sofia Gubaidulina
2017-02-27 Tribute to Sofia Gubaidulina

Curated by John Heiss, director of NEC's Contemporary Ensemble, the February 27 program highlights include the narration of Schoenberg's commedia dell'arte piece Pierrot Lunaire by Paula Robison, who occupies NEC’s Donna Hieken Flute Chair. Robison knows the narration in German, French, and English—this will be a unique opportunity to hear her perform a vocal work. Also, the Omer Quartet, participants in NEC's Professional String Quartet Training Program, will play Webern's Bagatelles 6 for String Quartet, Op. 9. Three other works by Gubaidulina are to be performed as well. Before the concert, Gubaidulina will be presented with an Honorary Doctorate by Interim President Thomas Novak. Heiss comments:

"Sofia Gubaidulina is a composer who is virtually unknown in America, but what an incredibly important person she is to music, and I am thrilled that NEC is presenting her with an honorary degree. Gubaidulina brings a wonderful emotional quality to her scores, and I know how highly she is thought of in Europe and Russia. This event is so important to our students, because they truly believe in new music. It has been amazing to see their excitement and watch them prepare, especially because they know Gubaidulina will be rehearsing with them and listening at the concert."

The ever-popular “Do You Hear What I Hear” series is a collaboration between NEC and the Boston Symphony Orchestra that presents unique—and decidedly eclectic—hour-long prelude concerts. At NEC on February 23, NEC students coached by Stephen Drury will perform works by Sofia Gubaidulina as well as others. BSO Assistant Artistic Administrator and NEC alumnus Eric Valliere will moderate a conversation with the composer.

After the NEC event, many patrons will hop over to Symphony Hall to listen to the BSO's world premiere of Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Bayan, in addition to other works she has composed.

For the final week of Andris Nelsons’s February concerts at Symphony Hall February 23–25, he leads the world premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s BSO co-commissioned Triple Concerto for violin, cello, and bayan, featuring soloists Baiba Skride, Harriet Krijgh, and Elsbeth Moser, respectively. The bayan is a Russian button accordion, a traditional instrument featured in many of Gubaidulina’s works. The program closes with Shostakovich’s epic Symphony No. 7, "Leningrad," which depicts the heroic struggle of the citizens of Leningrad during the Third Reich’s long siege on that city in World War II. These performances are part of Andris Nelsons’s ongoing, Grammy Award–winning Shostakovich cycle with the BSO. This program will also be performed at Carnegie Hall on February 28.

New England Conservatory's Piano Department invites the public to join NEC students in exploring the challenges and complexities that pianists face in the world today, through presentations and masterclasses by guest artists and NEC faculty. On February 24, Sofia Gubaidulina will discuss her music and coach students of NEC's piano department.

About Sofia GubaidulinaCollege | Composition

Sofia Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol in the Tatar Republic on 24 October 1931. She studied the piano (with Grigory Kogan) and composition, and graduated from the Kazan Conservatory in 1954. Until 1959 she studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory with Nikolai Peiko, Shostakovich’s assistant, and then did postgraduate work under Vissarion Shebalin. She has been active as a composer since 1963. In 1975, together with Viktor Suslin and Vyacheslav Artyomov, she founded the "Astreya" Ensemble, which specialized in improvising on rare Russian, Caucasian, Central Asian, and East Asian folk and ritual instruments. These hitherto unknown sounds and timbres and ways of experiencing musical time had a profound influence on her creative work. Since the early 1980s, and especially due to the support and encouragement given to her by Gidon Kremer, her works have been performed widely in Western countries.

Sofia has particular interest in setting visionary and prophetic texts by T.S. Eliot, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Gennadi Aigi. Gubaidulina’s aural imagination lends to themes of spirituality and unorthodox formats developed through sonic experiments in her film music. A striking feature of Gubaidulina’s work is the almost total absence of "absolute" music.

She is, together with Schnittke and Denisov, one of three major Moscow composers of the post-Shostakovich era. One of the earliest Soviet composers to show a deep interest in religious themes, her music can at one extreme be improvisatory, such as Garden of Joys and Sorrows for flute, viola and harp, and at the other extreme be strictly organized on ancient mystical principles such as the orchestral works Symphony: Stimmen… verstummen and Zeitgestalten. This is reflected in numerous commissions from Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet, Mstislav Rostropovich, the Kronos and Arditti Quartets, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Sir Simon Rattle, the BBC, the Berlin Festival, the Library of Congress, NHK, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and other institutions, and in the availability of many recordings.

Sofia has received numerous awards and prizes. These include the Rome International Composer’s Competition (1974), the Prix de Monaco (1987), the Koussevitzky International Record Award (1989 and 1994) for the CD recording of her violin concerto Offertorium, and her symphony Stimmen ... verstummen ..., the Premio Franco Abbiato (1991), the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis (1991) and the Russian State Prize (1992). Her recent awards include the Ludwig Spohr Prize of the City of Brunswick (1995), the Japanese Praemium Imperiale (Tokyo, 1998), the Prize of the Léonie Sonning Music Foundation in Copenhagen (1999), the Stockholm Concert Hall Foundation’s Honorary Medal in Gold (2000), the Goethe Medal of the City of Weimar (2001), the Polar Music Prize (2002), The Great Distinguished Service Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2002) as well as the Living Composer Prize in the Cannes Classical Awards 2003. In 2017, the Madrid-based BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award was bestowed on Gubaidulina. These awards honor contemporary music practitioners side by side with scientific researchers. More about this

More about Sofia Gubaidulina