LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina was one of the first modern women composers to achieve international acclaim.
(SOUNDBITE OF NDR RADIOPHILHARMONIE PERFORMANCE OF SOFIA GUBAIDULINA'S "PRO ET CONTRA:III")
FADEL: She died yesterday at the age of 93. And as NPR's Tom Huizenga reports, she leaves behind a portfolio of arresting music inspired by her spirituality and the pure joy of sound itself.
TOM HUIZENGA, BYLINE: Sofia Gubaidulina's music was often large in scope, philosophical in its overview, but intimate in the painterly details she conjured from a giant orchestra.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEWANDHAUSORCHESTER PERFORMANCE OF SOFIA GUBAIDULINA'S "THE LIGHT OF THE END (PT. 2)")
ANDRIS NELSONS: She's, like, burning for her music. She really exactly knows what she wants to express, and she puts everything in the score.
HUIZENGA: That's conductor Andris Nelsons, a champion of Gubaidulina. But the music and the composer were not always so well-received. In 1973, a supposed KGB agent tried to strangle Gubaidulina in a Moscow elevator. And six years later, her music was officially denounced as, quote, "noisy mud" by the very Soviet composers' union she joined in 1961.
For a while, like a number of her colleagues, Gubaidulina composed film music to make ends meet, like the Soviet animated version of Kipling's "The Jungle Book."
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HUIZENGA: Gubaidulina was born in 1931 in the rural Tatar region of the Soviet Union. She grew up poor, but her imagination was rich. As a kid playing in a bare yard, her adventures, she said, took place in the clouds. She knew music would be her destiny when a piano was delivered to her home.
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HUIZENGA: Gubaidulina studied piano and composition first in the region's capital, Kazan, then in Moscow, where the revered composer Dmitri Shostakovich told her to stay on her, quote, "incorrect path."
In 1981, her violin concerto "Offertorium" was a breakthrough, bringing her attention in the West.
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HUIZENGA: Gubaidulina wrote her second violin concerto in 2007 for Anne-Sophie Mutter.
ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER: Meeting Sofia Gubaidulina is one of the greatest treasures in my life because she's a woman from a different world really, with very high expectations of life, of people, of values - of course, of musical values, as well as human values.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER AND LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA'S PERFORMANCE OF SOFIA GUBAIDULINA'S "IN TEMPUS PRAESENS")
HUIZENGA: Gradually, Gubaidulina's music became more philosophical, more spiritual. In an interview, she once said that music can expand the higher dimension of our lives. In 2000, for a commission to celebrate the millennium, Gubaidulina composed her "St. John Passion" - a mammoth oratorio for chorus and orchestra.
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ST PETERSBURG CHAMBER CHOIR AND MARIINSKY THEATRE ORCHESTRA: (Singing in non-English language).
HUIZENGA: After the fall of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina moved to a village outside Hamburg, Germany, where she could work in peace, fulfilling her many commissions. She earned dozens of awards and honorary doctorates. For Andris Nelsons, Gubaidulina was a living legend. Although she's gone, her music, he says, still radiates.
NELSONS: At the end, that's what the mission of music is - to bring us in this world of emotions, in a world of fantasy and a world of spirituality. And that's what she does with her music.
HUIZENGA: Tom Huizenga, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEWANDHAUSORCHESTER PERFORMANCE OF SOFIA GUBAIDULINA'S "THE LIGHT OF THE END (PT. 2)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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