A quaternion may be a mathematical operation, but there's nothing calculated or contrived about Quaternion for four cellos (1996), which here receives its first recording. At its best – as it certainly is here – Gubaidulina's music manages to combine a fiercely improvisatory freedom with a satisfying sense of balance and coherence.
On one level Quaternion concerns the contrast between the mundane and the transcendent. Yet although the music contains strikingly immediate evocations of both the earthy and the uncanny, it never suggests the withdrawn serenity of a spirituality that regards the real world as 'lost'. Ivashkin and his colleagues achieve marvels of co-ordination, as well as an astonishingly wide range of colour, qualities enhanced by a truthful and well-balanced recording.
Two earlier works complete the programme.
The Ten Preludes for solo cello (1974) encapsulate energy and expressiveness to highly charged poetic effect. In Croce for cello and organ (1979) transforms what could have been a simplistic exercise in the crossing over of two very different sound sources into a grippingly unpredictable drama of convergence and divergence. Both pieces have been recorded before, and you might welcome the chance to acquire the bargain- price version of In Croce in its alternative arrangement for cello and accordion (Naxos).
But Alexander Ivashkin is a fine player, unsurpassed in Gubaidulina's music.