of which removes one note from the beginning and end of the theme. (After the third variation, the original theme is hard to make out.) After the theme's demise the central section is a free rhapsody. The final section is a slow string chorale that resembles a Russian Orthodox hymn. Beneath this, the harps and piano reconstruct the theme note by note, in reverse (retrograde), a process that concludes only at the very end with a complete statement from the solo violin. In uniting her twin inspirations, Webern and Bach, and in the deep Christian symbolism of the theme's "death" and "resurrection", Offertorium is a work representative of Gubaidulina's mature period. Performance The prospects for a performance of Offertorium were tenuous, however: Kremer, the person to whom it had been dedicated and given to perform, was at odds with the Moscow government for refusing to return to the Soviet Union at the end of his two-year period of permission to perform worldwide. Gubaidulina was worried that her piece would never be performed by Kremer, who instead chose to stay in the West. The work’s subject matter was also a barrier to its being performed, as religion was a touchy topic at the time. (In fact, Gubaidulina was unofficially criticized by Tikhon Khrennikov for her heavy use of religion as inspiration). Faced with such bleak circumstances, Gubaidulina asked her publisher Jürgen Köchel to smuggle the score to Kremer through the All-Union Agency on Copyrights. While this was happening, Gubaidulina attempted to have the chorale from Offertorium used in a film (The Great Samoyed by Arkady Kordon) for which she was scoring the music, but this was rejected by the director. The score did, however, finally reach the West and Kremer, who found a venue – the Wiener Festwochen – and the necessary resources to perform the forty-minute piece. Offertorium was first performed in 1981 in Vienna by Kremer and the ORF Symphony Orchestra, directed by Leif Segerstam, and was immediately lauded for its striking beauty. In Russia, it was first performed in 1982 (in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory) by Oleg Kagan and the Symphony Orchestra of the Ministry of Culture under Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Gubaidulina was requested to prepare a shortened version, completed in 1986, although it is debatable whether the concerto actually needed cutting; nonetheless, the changes did not detract from appreciation of the work, and the revised