Legendary Russian composer Gubaidulina dies in Germany

Legendary avant-garde composer Sofia Gubaidulina has died in Germany, where she spent more than 30 years of her life after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Gubaidulina, who was 93, was one of a group of composers blacklisted in the Soviet Union in 1979.

But her work eventually reached the West, where she was feted for her fusion of modern music with spiritual and religious themes.

She was born in Chistopol in Tatarstan in October 1931 into a Russian-Tatar family.

Her family soon moved to Kazan in southern Russia where she studied music, before moving to the Moscow Conservatoire in 1954.

Although the great Dmitry Shostakovich had already been dismissed from the Conservatoire, his former assistant Nikolai Peïko introduced her to the works of Mahler, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Shostakovich soon spotted her talents and told her that she could follow her own "incorrect path", however misguided it might seem.

Gubaidulina's compositions were condemned by the Soviet system and her work was banned in the 1960s and 70s.

She was one of three legendary, avant-garde Russian composers to be disgraced, along with Schnittke and Denisov.

"We were all very different artists," she told the BBC in 2013. "Edison Denisov was a classicist with very subtle yet strict logic. Alfred Schnittke was a romantic. My style could be best described as archaic."

It was only when by chance she shared a taxi in Moscow with violinist Gidon Kremer in the late 1970s that her life changed.

He suggested that she write a violin concerto, and it was this composition, Offertorium, in which she borrowed a theme from Bach, that gave her an international following in the West, after it was premiered by Kremer in Vienna in 1981.

Schnittke praised the work as "perhaps the most important violin concerto of the 20th Century".

The Union of Soviet Composers blacklisted her in 1979, condemning her and six fellow composers for writing "pointlessness... noisy mud instead of musical innovation".

She was first allowed to travel to the West in 1984, for a festival in Finland.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Gubaidulina moved to an unassuming house in the quiet village of Appen near Hamburg in northern Germany.

Conductor Sir Simon Rattle spoke of her as a "flying hermit", always in orbit and only occasionally visiting Earth.

"It's very tempting to set up rules," she once said. "They very quickly get hopelessly out of date."