Gubaiduliana String quartet no 3

 Day 75

Gubaiduliana String quartet no 3

Quatuor Molinari

After yesterday’s encounter with a composer who died tragically young today’s musician lived to a ripe old age. Sofia Gubaidliana died this week aged 93. She was one of the leading composers of the post-Shostakovich era. She grew up in an atmosphere where any trace of the avant garde was officially prohibited - though she was able to obtain scores of many Western contemporary composers - and then lived though the thaw in musical ideas in post communist Russia,

I’d not heard any of her music before and wasn’t sure what to expect. I found this a fascinating score. It is principally an exercise in sonority. The first three quarters of the piece (it is in a single movement) explore various pizzicato techniques, including harmonics, pizzicato with the left had only, standard pizzicato and then Bartók  pizzicato where the string is bounced against the fingerboard. Much of the music relies on much-repeated ostinato figures where there is no rhythmic co-ordination between the parts. The texture here is reminiscent of the effects you find in Ligeti or early Penderecki.  Only towards the end do any arco techniques arrive. Here the music is more closely organised with recognisable melodic shapes and a sense of pulse. Indeed this music seemed quite backward looking in comparison with the much more modern sounds which preceded it. At times I was reminded of Berg or perhaps Bartók.

The one thing that  I find rather disconcerting was the fairly frequent use of single very loud notes to interrupt an otherwise very quiet texture. Sometime this works but it has to be said that at time the effect can be almost comic - I’m sure that that was not the intention. You get the same problem in Webern and I find it a real distraction. 

That apart this was certainly a good piece to listen to and I am glad that I discovered it - it was only a pity that it was the report of her death than prompted me to explore her musical world.