St Peter’s Church, Drogheda

Sofia Gubaidulina – Reflection on a theme B-A-C-H. Bach – Cello Suite No 1. Sofia Gubaidulina – Garden of Joy and Sorrow. In Croce. Repentance.

SOFIA GUBAIDULINA will be 80 next year. But it’s still less than 20 years since her works started appearing in concert programmes in Ireland. She wasn’t the only Russian or Soviet composer of the time whose music was slow to come to attention here, nor is she the only one whose work shows the kind of spiritual concerns that would have been anathema to the Soviet authorities. And her relationship with officialdom can’t have been helped either by the worlds of unusual sonority that she has chosen to explore so assiduously or by the fixity of will she has shown in pursuing her art. In person, she doesn’t look her age. She was a sprightly presence at St Peter’s Church in Drogheda (a legacy of an enthusiasm for gymnastics and tennis in her youth, perhaps), where a hugely appreciative audience welcomed the first portrait concert of her work to be presented in Ireland.

In musical terms, Gubaidulina is very much a child of the 1960s, a woman who pushes the envelope of instrumental possibility in consistently intriguing ways.

Take for example the most recent work heard on Saturday, Repentance (2008) for cello (Ivan Monighetti), three guitars (members of the Dublin Guitar Quartet) and double bass (Malachy Robinson).

Gubaidulina effectively treats the guitars as a single hyper- instrument, a multi-handed strumming and plucking machine, with bass reinforcement on hand from two sources, and with Hawaiian guitar effects, and even some passages of parallel major chords, laid on as extras. The cello is a passionate, sometimes anguished, sometimes rhapsodic voice, raised against the fascinating babble of the guitars.Conflicts and contrasts of an extreme nature are often at the heart of Gubaidulina’s works. In croce for cello and bayan (the accordionist Dermot Dunne) works through rudimentary oppositions of high and low, the bayan conceived as “a mighty spirit that sometimes descends to Earth to vent its wrath”, the cello as something completely human, and their interaction forms a symbolic cross, as they exchange musical places. Repentance and In Croce, which formed the second part of the programme, were performed with fiery impact.

However, the pre-interval performance of Garden of Joy and Sorrowfor flute, viola and harp (the Oriel Trio) was let down by inadequately variegated flute playing.The evening opened with a leap across the centuries. Gubaidulina's Reflections on the Theme B-A-C-H(played by the Heath String Quartet) wove a complex rope of Bachian material that, in spite of its apparent density and weight, ever strove upwards. Bach's Cello Suite No 1 was freely delivered by Monighetti in a tone that suggested both sinew and satin.