Sofia Gubaidulina - Offertorium

Sofia Gubaidulina (1931 - ) - Offertorium (1980, rev. 1982 and 1986) Gidon Kremer, violin Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Dutoit (1988) Sofia Gubaidulina’s Offertorium is a concerto for violin and orchestra written for and dedicated to Gidon Kremer. The idea of writing a violin concerto came from a chance conversation between Gubaidulina and Kremer, in which Kremer offhandedly requested for her to write one. At the time of its completion, both Kremer and Gubaidulina were not in good standing with the Soviet government, so the work had to be smuggled to Kremer, who gave the work’s premier performance in 1981 in Vienna. The work typically lasts around 35 minutes. “Until the early 1980s, Gubaidulina’s works were little known in the USSR because of the authorities’ disapproval of her compositional style, and her music was also virtually unknown in the west. Performances of this violin concerto changed those circumstances in Europe and later in the United States, as Gidon Kremer, the Latvian violinist for whom it was written and then dedicated, took the work to European centers. Its popularity established Gubaidulina’s reputation. Like many of the composer’s works, the piece uses musical structures to symbolize and express spiritual ideas, while simultaneously suggesting those concerns to the listener through the use of a musical language of brilliant instrumental colors and meditative movement. Offertorium opens with the theme on which Frederick the Great of Prussia requested that Bach write a fugue, but which Bach used instead in A Musical Offering. Gubaidulina treats this theme in the manner of Webern, changing the instruments which play the melody every few notes. The transformation of this theme into a melody of instrumental colors (Klangfarbenmelodie) is significant because Gubaidulina has here united Bach and Webern, the two composers who she says have made the greatest impression on her. Webern himself composed an orchestral version of the Ricercata from A Musical Offering which featured Klangfarbenmelodie, so with Offertorium Gubaidulina has composed a work based on the same theme that had been used by the two composers who were so important to her. The concerto’s title Offertorium relates to the ’offering’ of Bach’s Musical Offering, but also represents the crucial spiritual idea of the work, which is embodied in the music. The theme mentioned above essentially “offers“ or sacrifices itself throughout the piece’s first section. A series of variations is presented, with the melody appearing shortened in each by a note from the beginning and one from the end, until there is only one note of the theme left. Each variation is based on the last two notes which remain in the melody after another note has been removed. After this process is completed the second section, according to the composer, centers on the Last Judgment and the suffering of Christ on the cross, and contains almost no trace of the melody used by Bach. In the third section the theme rebuilds itself note by note, starting from the one central note that had remained at the end of the first section, but the pitches arrange themselves in the opposite order to their initial shape, and the theme is now backwards, symbolizing the idea of “conversion“. In the final portion of the work, the coda, the theme is again presented backwards, now “transfigured“, and the music ends in a rapturous, meditative style. Offertorium forms part of a cycle of three concertos which Gubaidulina sees as forming an instrumental mass, titled Proprium. These three works, however, are performed in traditional concert hall settings, usually in isolation. The mass idea was conceived of by the composer in 1978 when she began work on the first of the three, Introitus, a concerto for piano and small orchestra (an Introit being the first item of the traditional Mass). Offertorium is the second work, composed for the most part just after Introitus in 1979 and 1980 (then revised in 1982 and 1986). Detto II is the final work in the trilogy, but was actually written before the others, in 1972, and also has spiritual concerns.“ (source: AllMusic)