One of the first Soviet composers to benefit from glasnost, Sofia Gubaidulina became known in the west in the mid-1980s, especially for her violin concerto Offertorium and her female-male dialogue Perception, for soprano, baritone and string septet.

Tanglewood

Sofia Gubaidulina is a small, trim woman in her mid-sixties with a wide bowl of black hair (the gift of her Tatar ancestors) and a candid smile she repeated after each of the five performances in Wednesday's Tanglewood concert entirely devoted to her. Her appearance accords with the simplicity of her music, which is not the simplicity of old modes, few notes and repetitive forms but rather that of creative spontaneity. It is as if, when she composes, she has nothing in her head but the idea of certain musicians in a room. What will they do? What will happen? The process of composition is a way of finding out.

Take the four flutes of her 1977 Quartet. They start to talk to each other, at first with single notes and pairs, and gentle music begins to unfold. But this is not it. They start again, exactly as before, and a different musical path is taken. Eventually, after other stops, we arrive at what seems to have been the point: a blinding shriek such as one had not expected these instruments capable of.

Music like this needs patience. You have to be prepared to follow its fanciful, probably rather uneventful course in order to be there when the shock comes. Flutes turn angry.