The composer Sofia Gubaidulina has died in Germany at the age of 93. Gubaidulina was one of the leading Russian composers of her generation, pioneering Modernist techniques and religious themes at a time when both were repressed by the Soviet authorities. She spent the last decades of her life in Germany, writing large-scale works to commissions from Western orchestras, but always retaining strong links to her Orthodox faith and Russian roots.

Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol in southern European Russia in 1931. After studies at the Kazan Conservatory, she studied at the Moscow Conservatory under the composers Nikolai Peyko and Vissarion Shebalin. The uncompromising intensity, radical atonality, and dynamic extremes of her later work were already apparent in a series of early piano pieces, including Chaconne (1963) and Piano Sonata (1965), both of which have retained significant status in the repertoire. Meanwhile, Gubaidulina made a living composing music for films and documentaries, achieving minor celebrity in Russia with her score for the Kipling-based animation Adventures of Mowgli (1971).

Her Western breakthrough came with Offertorium, a violin concerto premiered by Gidon Kremer in Vienna in 1981. The concerto takes the ‘Royal’ theme from The Musical Offering and fractures it into individual notes dispersed around the orchestra, demonstrating the dual influences of Bach and Webern. The religious and ritualistic connotations of the title are also indicative: like many in Soviet Russia, Gubaidulina adopted the Orthodox faith in the 1970s, despite the state repression, and it would go on to inform all her later work.

In 1992, Gubaidulina moved to a small village near Hamburg, and most of her later works were written to Western commissions. In 2000, she was commissioned by Helmuth Rilling’s Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart to compose a setting of the St John Passion as part of a project to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. In 2002, she followed this with a complementary oratorio, Johannes-Ostern, the resulting diptych her largest-scale composition.

In later years, her music was championed by leading Western performers, including Anne-Sophie Mutter, who commissioned a second violin concerto, In Tempus Praesens (2007, read the review), which she premiered with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. Andris Nelsons and the Gewandhaus Orchestra have also been important advocates, releasing an album of her recent works - Ich und Du, The Wrath of God, The Light of the End – on DG in 2021 (read the review).