A few months ago Sofia Gubaidulina turned 90, and so a composer portrait was dedicated to her for the second time in the series “Night Music of the Modern Age”, this time under the direction of Clemens Schuldt exclusively with strings plus percussion and two wonderful soloists: the violinist Josef Špaček in “The Lyre of Orpheus” and the bayan player Geir Draugsvoll in “Fachwerk”.
The mediating piece “Meditation on the Bach chorale ‘Before your throne, I step here'” from 1993 was the oldest of the top-class musical evening. Thanks to the giant sail “Sonnenenergie 22” by Olafur Eliasson hovering over the orchestra, a much more direct, more compact sound could be experienced than with the open-topped rotunda in the Pinakothek der Moderne. A string quintet faces the harpsichord and, as indicated in the title, one hardly hears the chorale in its original form, rather the five strings seem to be searching for it with the harpsichord, which ends with a quote from the famous bach.
The interaction between solo violin and (solo) cello or the other sections of the string orchestra in “Die Leier des Orpheus” (2006) in a constantly changing process is quite different. In the end it almost leads to catastrophe before an unreal glass bead game follows as an ethereal conclusion. While the violin often merges with its string counterparts, the bayan, the Eastern European version of the accordion, in “Fachwerk” (2009) is a solitaire opposite the strings and the two percussionists. Here, too, there are endless facets of expression and tonal possibilities, sometimes with wonderfully vague tonal chords of the bayan that spread an iridescent tapestry of sound. Geir Draugsvoll is the dedicatee, recorded the piece in 2011 and now plays it with phenomenal confidence. Again, the action builds up to a near-catastrophe, only to end magically again – with a long lingering chime of the gong.