Feast During a Plague (2005)

...Simon Rattle came to town to lead the première of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Feast During a Plague, which had the power of a prophetic utterance. Gubaidulina intended her work as an eagle-eyed view of a riven world — abject misery on the one hand, empty-headed pleasure-seeking on the other — and she found a potent metaphor for her vision. A mammoth landscape of orchestral desolation, mixing craggy fanfares and insectoid movement up and down the chromatic scale, is periodically disrupted by blasts of prerecorded techno music. The piece builds to a numbing polyrhythmic climax, then shatters into silence...

World Premiere
Philadelphia Orchestra/Rattle
15 February 2006; Philadelphia, PA

...every once in a while, if you’re an orchestra that commissions often enough, you find yourself playing a role in the birth of an important piece of art, as was the case when the [Philadelphia Orchestra] and Simon Rattle premiered Sofia Gubaidulina’s Feast During a Plague.

Gubaidulina’s 25-minute work — co-commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra — is proof that great ideas transcend issues of style. The work is up there on the dissonance meter, but it is so startlingly original, so aesthetically singular, that it captures your attention solidly from its opening strident brass fanfare to an emotionally equivocating end.

Dissonant music, yes. But far from abstract, and endlessly meaningful.

...I’m not the first critic to love Sofia Gubaidulina’s new, single-movement Feast During a Plague and won’t be the last. Though Gubaidulina’s apocalyptic message can all but dissolve typical methods of musical construction, this unusually direct piece has numerous references to classic symphonic format... Once development was under way, new elements arrived (an old Mozart technique)... With those kinds of formal expectations, the arrival of a mechanized, prerecorded rhythm track uncoordinated with the rest of the piece was all the more arresting... Ultimately, the piece inhabited the oddest of zones between sensual delirium and spiritual transfiguration. What other composer can do — or has done — that?

Just got back from a terrific concert: Simon Rattle and the Philadelphia Orchestra with the world premiere of Feast During a Plague, a symphonic poem based on a short scenario by Pushkin set in a tavern during ... well, a plague. [But] it’s not a literal setting... For the first 15 minutes or so, it’s an exquisitely composed and orchestrated evocation of decay... Much of the material is based on major and minor seconds and glissandi, but it’s paced and passed around the orchestra with such deftness that it’s like looking at a Bosch painting: it’s so queasy-looking, but precisely rendered, and the detail work is what makes you acutely uneasy. I’ve never heard this kind of writing brought off with such precision...