Composed in 1986, Gubaidulina's Symphony was introduced to British audiences by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra; and it featured prominently in a TV documentary film, where her own charismatic demonstration of the ninth of its 12 movements—the ''Cadenza for Conductor''—was unforgettable.
Cadenza for Conductor? That has to be a leg-pull, doesn't it? Actually, no. It represents the consummation of the entire structural concept of the work, based as this is on a mystical belief in the power of the Golden Section proportion. The Cadenza is not entirely unaccompanied, by the way. But it inevitably loses something without the visual element (and I'm tempted to add that the same applies to any Rozhdestvensky performance—I would dearly love to have his Shostakovich Hamlet on video, for instance).
Does the rest of the work stand up to scrutiny in a sound-only medium? I wish I could honestly say it does. Certainly you sense that something important must be behind the music to provoke such intensity of utterance. But heard without an explanation of the underlying symbolism I fear the slithering string heterophony, the brass expectorations, and the cluttered tuttis (all mainly in the even-numbered movements), will probably strike even the most sympathetic ears as just a messier version of Ligeti or Lutoslawski; and the numinous concords of the odd-numbered movements, reminiscent at times of the Second Act of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, are thin material for the structural weight they have to carry.
All this is not to deny that Gubaidulina has her own rich inner world which is often fascinating to observe. If the idea appeals of a more avant-garde sounding version of Panufnik (to mention a symphonist with a comparable fascination for architectonic proportion-schemes) this may be just the thing for you. For me, Gubaidulina, compelling as she is in person, shares the weakness of many charismatics—that her concepts are generally more interesting than their realization. And the proof comes with Stufen (1972). Not having come across this 18-minute work before, and not having seen an insert-note for either work, I was entirely dependent on the aural impression. And once again that impression was of rather undirected, unfocused, and not always well-heard musical invention. Stufen concludes with overlapping spoken intonations of a portentously mystical text, in a manner which would be dismissable as plain gimmicky were it not so obviously unselfconscious.
So far as I can tell these are well-prepared and accurate performances; the recorded sound has little of the expected Chandos bloom, however. Making available as it does one of the most important works of a highly-rated living composer the issue is welcome and invites investigation. I wish I could feel that the intrinsic quality of the music reinforces that recommendation.'