Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina turns 70 this year. She belongs to the post-Shostakovich generation of Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, and her distinctive music uses wild, modernist gestures to create a lucid, expressive world. The Centre for Russian Music's day of concerts at the Purcell Room was London's only celebration of her birthday.
The Moscow Quartet's performance of the four string quartets revealed the physicality of her music. She demands extreme performance techniques, from violent bow-strokes to passages for the left hand alone, in which the players tap, stroke and generally abuse their fingerboards. This is a music as much about texture and timbre as it is about pitches and rhythms.
The First Quartet even requires the players to move gradually to the edge of the platform, creating a visual parallel for the fragmentation of the music. The Third Quartet is a study in contrasting sound-worlds, as an unsettled pizzicato section is followed by a sensuous, bowed passage.
But even in the conviction of these performances there was something impenetrable about the music. This is partly because the power of individual pieces was diluted by being played alongside every other work Gubaidulina has written for string quartet. After a while, every contrast, no matter how dramatic, began to sound hackneyed.
And for all the vividness of particular moments - such as the memorably obsessive emphasis on a single pitch at the opening of the Second Quartet - the effect of the structures as a whole was more confusing than coherent. There is a sense of the baroque about Gubaidulina's imagery, as if each gesture has a precisely defined spiritual or emotional reference; but it was hard to divine the symbols' meanings.
Jean-Pierre Armengaud's recital of the piano music gave glimpses of a forceful imagination in her piano writing, but he seemed ill at ease with the technical requirements.
Cellist Alexander Ivashkin performed the pithy 10 Preludes, and was joined by Elsbeth Moser in an arrangement for bayan (a Russian accordion) of In Croce, a piece originally written for cello and organ. Quaternion, for cello quartet, concluded this concert, and its conflict between two cellos tuned a quarter-tone flatter than their colleagues contains potentially fascinating music. But in the context of a day of Gubaidulina's music, it came across as indigestible.
