Repentance

Within the output of Sofia Gubaidulina, solo and chamber music occupies a position of prominence; she has written more than eighty such works. One of the earliest is the brief – and not really typical – Serenade for solo guitar from 1960, composed as a commission from a Moscow publishing house for inclusion in a collection of guitar compositions. The composer was asked to write a piece not overly difficult or progressive, and has later described the result as ‘music for pleasure’. Demonstrating a particular closeness to the guitar, Gubaidulina’s later writing for it has exploited its sound spectrum in previously unimagined ways.

Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt lived through times of remarkable change in the last decades of the Soviet Union. From the 1970s, state restrictions on religion were gradually relaxed and this was reflected in the arts and especially in music. Schnittke’s adoption of Christianity was triggered by the death of his mother in 1972, and culminated in his later conversion to Catholicism. Pärt was from a nominally Lutheran background in Estonia, but embraced the Orthodox faith in the 1970s, following intensive study of liturgical music. Both composers began to incorporate religious themes into their work, moving away from the modernist abstraction that had characterized their early careers.