Sofia Gubaidulina

Sofia Gubaidulina was born in 1931 in Chistopol, in the Tatar region of the Soviet Union, and studied in Kazan and Moscow. Her music, experimental in technique and openly spiritual in intent, sat badly with Soviet cultural officials, and she was blacklisted in 1979 among composers whose work was denounced. She recalled Shostakovich's encouragement to continue on her own "mistaken" path, advice she took to heart. Film scoring helped pay the bills through the lean years.

Faith was the center of her work, not as decoration but as its declared purpose; she described composing as a religious act. Her breakthrough in the West came when the violinist Gidon Kremer championed her violin concerto Offertorium in the 1980s, and in 1992 she moved to Germany, settling near Hamburg, where she lived and worked until her death in 2025.

Start with Offertorium, the violin concerto that carried her name around the world.