The arrival of a CD of music for the Russian push-button accordion by a woman composer in her mid-sixties might seem an interesting novelty, a distinctive contribution from an idiosyncratic voice. Yet this disc marks rather the consolidation of a performing tradition in miniature. The Swiss accordion player Elsbeth Moser played in the first Western performance of the best-known piece here – the Seven Last Words – and this is at least the third recording of the work. The current catalogue can also boast several versions of In croce in its original scoring for cello and organ.
Those unfamiliar with Gubaidulina’s distinctive sound-world should start with the Seven Last Words which has something of the immediacy of appeal of her violin concerto, Offertorium (DG, 9/89). The physical impact made by the smaller works in live performance is less easily conveyed in the recording studio. In its revised form, In croce is archetypal Gubaidulina in its attempt to create a meaningful narrative from opposing, seemingly dichotomous elements: folk music and art music, the human and the divine, Ligeti and Shostakovich. On the one hand a volatile, unstable chromaticism, on the other the reassurance of melody and traditional triadic harmonies. The preoccupation with exploring the character of single notes, whether rich and vibrant or tentative and trembling, makes her music sound different from, more ascetic than, Schnittke’s. Often her invention is spun from threads fined down almost to vanishing point.
But however unorthodox the means, there are obvious links with the Soviet past. Behind the stylistic juxtapositions, behind the smudged Ligeti of her textures, there lurks an authentic Shostakovichian gloom. It is this as much as the impenetrable Christian symbolism underlying what sound like pretty straightforward structural imperatives which has liberated her from the modern music ghetto. Naxos are to be congratulated for contributing to the process. There is a certain steely cool about the music-making here, a tendency to avoid the disturbing excesses of introversion and extroversion that some might see as part and parcel of Gubaidulina’s idiom, but, with Maria Kliegel once again proving herself a cellist of real distinction, the disc would be worth acquiring at twice the price.'