Sofia Gubaidulina, long an exemplar of contemporary Russian music, has turned into something of an elder stateswoman, her rigorous but rich-in-symbolism style having influenced a host of other, mostly younger composers. This program of contemporary trios from the former Soviet Union opens with Gubaidulina's String Trio of 1988, a piece tightly wound together with three-in-one units that at once bespeak the composer's mystical Christianity and function as a highly abstract organizing principle. The piece is gripping right ...
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Sofia Gubaidulina, long an exemplar of contemporary Russian music, has turned into something of an elder stateswoman, her rigorous but rich-in-symbolism style having influenced a host of other, mostly younger composers. This program of contemporary trios from the former Soviet Union opens with Gubaidulina's String Trio of 1988, a piece tightly wound together with three-in-one units that at once bespeak the composer's mystical Christianity and function as a highly abstract organizing principle. The piece is gripping right from the opening unisons and their dissolution, and it's a good introduction to Gubaidulina. But, whether the performers intended this or not, what's most interesting is how well the rest of the music seems to flow from Gubaidulina's language. The other composers, even if their languages are quite different from Gubaidulina's, all use a restricted set of material to develop an intense mode of expression. In the words of annotator Ivan Moody, this may be due to the "extreme, often...
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