The Edge of the Abyss Night 3
On the Edge of the Abyss: Chamber Music
August 30th, 2026 at 4:30 pm
Program:
Excerpts from Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs) à 5 (1996) for mezzo-soprano, flute, perc, (organ), double bass
VI. Die Prozession (The Procession)
XIV. Das Mondschaf (The Moon Sheep)
String Quartet No. 2 (1987)
Ein Engel (An Angel) (1994) for contralto and double bass
INTERMISSION
Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten (Garden of Joys and Sorrows) (1980) for flute, viola, harp and narrator
So sei es (So Be It) (2013) for violin, double bass, piano, and percussion
All works by Sofia Gubaidulina
Performed by the InfraSound Ensemble:
Sophie Delphis, mezzo-soprano
Luke Paulino, contralto
Yoshi Weinberg, flute and bass flute
Giancarlo Latta, violin
Madeline Hocking, violin
Elijah Spies, viola
Elizabeth Kate Hall-Keough, cello
Sam Zagnit, double bass
Austin Philemon, organ
Daniel Schreiner, piano
J Clancy, percussion
Program Notes
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol during Stalin’s reign and graduated from the Kazan Conservatory in 1954, one year after Khrushchev assumed power. In 1959, partway through her continued studies of composition and piano at the Moscow Conservatory, she met Dmitri Shostakovich and played for him the symphony she had recently written as her final examination. Empathizing with the challenges posed by subverting the strict parameters of the Soviet-approved realism style, Shostakovich praised the young composer’s work and told her to “continue along your mistaken path.” Following his advice expectedly worsened the shadow of the Soviet authorities, which escalated dramatically after the end of Khrushchev’s Thaw in 1964. In 1979, the Union of Soviet Composers blacklisted her as one of the Khrennikov Seven for writing “noisy mud instead of musical innovation, unconnected with real life.” However, Gubaidulina took the denunciation in stride, enduring the poverty that arose from the subsequent lack of paying commissions in order to take advantage of the creative liberty it afforded her.
Gubaidulina’s Russian Orthodox faith pervades her work, but she qualifies her intentions: “I understand ‘religion’ in the literal meaning of the word, as ‘re-ligio’, that is to say the restoration of connections, the restoration of the ‘legato’ of life. There is no more serious task for music than this." The motif of simultaneous, bidirectional glissandi in two instruments often appears in her work, forming a sonic symbol of the cross with their opposing trajectories. As in Garden of Joys and Sorrows, the composer often employs unconventional techniques alongside spiritual themes to bolster the restoration of connections which she seeks. Many of these tendencies were inspired by experimentation in the mid-1970s with Astreia, her improvisatory folk ensemble.
Despite the best efforts of the Soviets, Gubaidulina has enjoyed a prominent and celebrated career. She garnered international attention through her violin concerto, Offertorium (1980) which was championed by Gidon Kremer. Her work Light of the End (2003) was given the honored program slot before Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the BBC Proms. Anne-Sophie Mutter and the London Symphony Orchestra recorded her second violin concerto In Tempus Praesens (2007) under Valery Gergiev. Her 80th birthday in 2011 was commemorated by many organizations worldwide, including a series of three weeklong Gubaidulina Festivals in Kasan, Hanover, and Moscow. During the festivities, the composer premiered her Percussion Concerto; her revised Bayan Concerto; A Pilgrimage of Four for violin, piano, bass, and percussion; and a work for twelve solo celli, Labyrinth.
–Josh Davidoff
In 1973, Sofia Gubaidulina was attacked and strangled in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. Luckily, she escaped by yelling “Why is it taking you so long to kill me?” and scaring her attacker. Her friends later theorized the attacker was a KGB agent. Following the fall of the USSR, she lived in Appen, Germany, from 1992. The Steinway grand piano in her home was a gift from Rostropovich. She married three times; her second husband was writer and dissident Nikolai Bokov. Gubaidulina briefly stopped composing in 2012 after the deaths of her third husband Pyotr Meshchaninov, her daughter, and her friend and fellow composer Viktor Suslin.
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina passed away peacefully in her home on March 13th, 2025 in Appen, Germany at the age of 93.
InfraSound has always represented the voices of the marginalized, especially in the face of oppression and censorship. Although Gubaidulina saw music as an escape from the socio-political atmosphere of Soviet Russia, we view Sofia’s work as a vital representation of music as protest and as resistance. She associated music with human transcendence and mystical spiritualism which manifests itself as a longing inside the human soul to locate its true being, a longing she continually tried to capture in her works. Her ability to survive and create despite her circumstances are signals of the necessity of art as a form of survival under oppression. We perform these concerts in her honor.
–Yoshi Weinberg, Artistic Director of InfraSound
Galgenlieder (Gallow Songs) à 5 (1996)
VI. Die Prozession (The Procession)
XIV. Das Mondschaf (The Moonsheep)
Sofia Gubaidulina took Christian Morgenstern's collection of poems “Gallow Songs” as the starting point for her own song cycle. Gubaidulina initially adapted 15 of Morgenstern's seemingly childlike, formally simple poems, which are full of linguistic playfulness, for mezzo-soprano, double bass and percussion; she later reworked 14 of these songs for the present version for mezzo-soprano, flute, double bass, accordion [organ] and percussion. In her settings, Gubaidulina subtly explores the ambiguities of Morgenstern's originals and transforms their grotesque imagery into unique miniatures of sound. Today InfraSound presents a short 8 minute excerpt of the full 55 minute piece.
Text (by Christian Morgenstern, translation by Addison Zeller)
The Moonsheep stands in the open clearing.
Waits and waits for the last great shearing.
The Moonsheep.
The Moonsheep plucks itself a blade
And wanders homeward to its glade.
The Moonsheep.
The Moonsheep murmurs in its dream:
“I am the cosmos’ darkest seam.”
The Moonsheep.
The Moonsheep lies in the morning, dead.
Its body white; the sun is red.
The Moonsheep
Das Mondschaf steht auf weiter Flur.
Es harrt und harrt der großen Schur.
Das Mondschaf.
Das Mondschaf rupft sich einen Halm
und geht dann heim auf seine Alm.
Das Mondschaf.
Das Mondschaf spricht zu sich im Traum:
"Ich bin des Weltalls dunkler Raum."
Das Mondschaf.
Das Mondschaf liegt am Morgen tot.
Sein Leib ist weiß, die Sonn' ist rot.
Das Mondschaf.
String Quartet No. 2 (1987)
My second string quartet was composed in 1987 for the Kuhmo Festival in Finland, commissioned by the Sibelius Quartet. With this work, for the first time in my life, I set myself the task of addressing a specific musical problem—one of great personal significance to me—not in a large form, but in a small one.
For many years, I have been repeatedly fascinated by a concept I would call “musical symbolism.” This means that neither a sound nor a conglomeration of sounds appears as a symbol (i.e. a connection between things of different meanings), but rather individual elements of a musical instrument or the characteristics of those elements. Specifically, in the particular context of this string quartet, a dialectic arises from the difference between how normal sounds are produced on string instruments and how overtones can be made to sound on them.
Of course, one can view the transition from one type of sound production to the other dispassionately as a purely acoustic phenomenon and say no more about it. Yet it is just as possible to experience this phenomenon as a fundamental and essential transition from one state to another. And this is a very special aesthetic experience—an experience of a symbolic nature. It is precisely such an experience that marks the difference between everyday time and truly essential time, between existence and essence.
And this modulation, this transition between the two worlds of experience, does not occur through “representation” or “expression,” but through transformation or metamorphosis with the aid of an instrumental symbol. For this transition actually takes place on the instrument itself—in its acoustic self.
–Sofia Gubaidulina / Translation: Yoshi Weinberg
Ein Engel (An Angel) (1994)
Ein Engel was dedicated to Ulrich Eckhardt on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Eckhardt was a longtime supporter of Gubaidulina and the Berliner Festespiel. The text was written by Else Lasker-Schüler and describes an angel walking through a city gathering love for those who have passed on.
Text (by Elise Lasker-Schuler, translation by Yoshi Weinberg)
An angel walks invisibly through our city,
Gathering love for the ones who have returned home
Who still loved his neighbor—even above himself—
Just a sinngle tear for the beloved,
An eye that shines for his soul,
A pure word from your mouth’s red petals—
For him, to whom all sorrows have been confessed;
In his bitter comfort lay his deed.
Ein Engel schreitet unsichtbar durch unsere Stadt,
Zu sammeln Liebe für den Heimgekehrten,
Der noch den Nächsten – über sich – geliebet hat. –
Schon eine Träne für den Liebenswerten,
Ein Auge, das für seine Seele leuchtet,
Ein reines Wort, von deines Mundes rotem Blatt –
Für ihn, dem alle Sorgen ihr gebeichtet;
In seinem herben Tröste lag schon seine Tat.
Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten / Garden of Joys and Sorrows (1980)
The Garden of Joy and Sorrow is a one-movement piece for harp, flute and viola. It was conceived under the strong influence of two directly contradictory literary phenomena: 1) the work "Sayat-Nova” by Iv Oganov (Moscow), about the famous Eastern story-teller and singer, and 2) verses by the 20th century German poet Francisco Tanzer. Vivid Eastern color was counterposed to a typically Western consciousness. But both of these works had significant inner similarities: their contemplativeness and refinement.
Such phrases in Iv Oganov – "the ordeal of a flower’s pain,” "…the peal of the singing garden grew…,” "…the revelation of the rose…,” "…the lotus was set aflame by music,” "…the white garden began to ring again with diamond borders…” – impelled me to a concrete aural perception of this garden.
And, on the other hand, all this ecstatic flowering of the garden was expressed naturally in the sum reflections of the F. Tanzer about the world and its wholeness.
At the basis of the musical rendering of the form of this piece is the opposition of the bright, major coloration of the sphere of natural harmonics against the expression of the intervals of minor second and minor third.
–Sofia Gubaidulina
When is it really over?
What is the true ending?
All borders are drawn
into the Earth as if by a
Piece of wood or shoe heel.
Until then…
Here is the border
All that is, is artificial.
Tomorrow we play
A different game.
Text by Franciscco Tanzer, translation by Yoshi Weinberg
Wann is es wirklich aus?
Was ist das wahre Ende?
Alle Grenzen sind
Wie mit einem Stuck Holz
Oder einem Schuhabsatz
In die Erde gezogen.
Bis dahin…,
Hier is die Grenze.
Alles das ist kunstlich.
Morgen spielen wir
Ein anderes Spiel
So Sei Es (So Be It) (2013)
So Be It is the first complete composition by Sofia Gubaidulina after her year of crisis in 2012. She wrote the work “in memoriam Viktor Suslin”, who died on 10 July 2012. “So Be It” is the translation of the word “amen.”
The musicologist Tatiana Frumkis has written the following about this work: “(...) The B-A-C-H motif beloved by both Gubaidulina and Suslin appears like a secret seal, together with the ‘cross motif’ in the form of the theme of the Fugue in C-sharp minor from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier I. (...) The dramatic dialogue of the two ‘heroes’ (violin and double bass) develops in interaction with each other, and also together with the environment (piano and percussion) that by turns shows solidarity or animosity. This principle is found in many works of Gubaidulina that already belong to the classics of the 20th century (e.g. ‘In Croce’ and ‘Detto I’, ‘Seven Words’ and the Concerto for bassoon and strings). (...) The chorale that crowns the work with its shimmering harmonics sends her dear friend and faithful companion a farewell greeting ... A greeting bidding farewell, but not a final one, for their connection remains eternal … So be it”.
