St. John Passion (Johannes-Passion) (1999)

Gubaidulina’s St. John Passion, magnificently performed, is a passion to strike terror into a listener, and implied a terrible warning for Russia. Passages of the gospel in Russian are intercut with those from the Book of Revelation. The work has, in instruments and voices (and especially percussion), a shimmering, ringing, arresting sound that ultimately overwhelms, with climaxes that linger...The apocalypse appears to be just around the corner.

Gubaidulina's ST. JOHN PASSION is a phenomenal feat of composition. The basic ingredient of almost every solo or chorus, melody or gesture is the minor second, the interval that has represented sighs and groans of pain in Western music for centuries...From this Gubaidulina weaves textures of immense complexity...or draws out tellingly simple, sparingly harmonised chants or recitatives. [She also creates] frantic, polyphonically dense crescendos and passages of black stasis.