Sofia Gubaidulina has an extraordinary gift for dissolving the materials of music into her own spirit-world and re-shaping them there so that mysteries seem to speak. In some hands her rustling tremolando strings, hieratic gongs, grumbling double bassoon and whooping solo voice might sound no better than avant-garde kitsch, in her 1993 song-cycle Jetzt immer Schnee (''Now Always Snow'') the same effects are unmistakable tokens of spiritual ecstasy.
It's not exactly an uplifting ecstasy, I have to say. The verses are by Gennadi Aigi a poet Gubaidulina has known since student days, and his imagery is predominantly bleak, with occasional pale beams of redemptive light The brief bursts of carefully weighed syllables invite declamation, and Gubaidulina's music fits them like a glove. Her already familiar instrumental works are so strongly charged with symbolism you might think the presence of texts would hem her in. Not a bit of it. She moves around in her spiritually charged Lutoslawskian idiom with complete assurance, and from the shimmering opening to the final dissolving into the ether Jetzt immer Schnee is a compelling experience.
Mysteries speak to us too in Perception, composed ten years earlier to German poems by Gubaidulina's friend Francisco Tanzer. This is the source-work for her symphony Stimmen... verstummen, and ''Voices fall silent'' is indeed the final image of the texts. The 13 sections—nine poems and four sound-interludes for the strings—suggest a similar design to the symphony, and many of the instrumental textures are shared between the two works. Read the texts in isolation and you might think them about as profound as the musings of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and there are times when Gubaidulma's charisma is rather more obvious than her craftsmanship. But immerse yourself in the music and you will surely doubt neither the poet's nor the composer's resourcefulness. Soprano Stella Klendienst and baritone Siegfried Lorenz sing with marvellous sensitivity and the strings of the Schoenberg Ensemble sound entirely engrossed in the music. The same can be said of the Netherlands Chamber Choir in Jetzt immer Schnee.
If these works feel like the finest of Gubaidulina that may be because the performances and recording quality are far and away superior to those on other CDs of her work. My only regret is that Philips chose the German sleeve-note for translation rather than the far more informative Dutch one by Elmer Schonberger.'