Sofia Gubaidulina

Musical Toys is a set of fourteen pieces that conjure up Sofia Gubaidulina’s childhood musical dream: to have been able to play these pieces as a young girl, as her biographer, Michael Kurtz, explains. We move from a kind of merry-go-round (the second piece) to a storm (the fourth) and to the sounds of a forest (with a trumpet call in the third, a woodpecker in the fifth and a series of animals in the last). For this purpose, she combines syncopated rhythms typically found in jazz with textural interplay, such as clusters or extreme contrasts between fragility and density. In Introitus for piano and chamber orchestra, Gubaidulina evokes the solemnity of the priests’ entry at mass, drawing parallels with the audience’s immersion in sounds used to convey four religious states. This work by the great Russian composer takes on the aura of a religious service, created purely and simply with instrumental means.