Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)

[TheGSMoeller]

You've put Daniel in a Schnitt-koma.


(This is a good thing btw)   

[Karl Henning]

He's a full-fledged Шниткеник, now!

[TheGSMoeller]

He's a full-fledged Шниткеник, now!

Even better!! 

[Mirror Image]

Another Schnittkian classic: Piano Quintet -

Alfred Schnittke's Piano Quintet is a dark and heavy planet. Even in the midst of his bewilderingly prolific output, this extremely personal work commands a massive gravity; it seems to orient, arrange, and set in motion so many of Schnittke's works, before and after. If one wants to find the founding trauma for such a consistently agonizing body of artistic work, it can be found in the Piano Quintet.

This centrality may owe much to the quintet's function: conceived as a memorial to the composer's mother, who died of a stroke in September 1972, here's a composition whose substance was drawn from a real event, powerfully tangible and irrevocable. This kind of reality had not been Schnittke's basis for previous works. His Symphony No. 1 (1972) and other contemporaneous works are brazenly extroverted stylistic carnivals, full of fantasy, denunciation, and dark humor, and are largely artistic statements on art or cultural critiques on culture itself.

In this light, the Piano Quintet was a radical departure into an entirely personal sphere. This shift caused the composer tremendous difficulty. After finishing the first movement very quickly, Schnittke was blocked, "unable to continue because I had to take what I wrote from an imaginary space defined in terms of sound and put it into the psychological space as defined by life, where excruciating pain seems almost unserious, and one must fight for the right to use dissonance, consonance, and assonance."

Hence the Piano Quintet was shelved, and Schnittke did not resume work on it for almost four years. When he did pick up the work again, his musical temperament had changed, becoming more distilled, tauter, and more unabashedly morbid. Schnittke had perfected a personal sound, a dense, claustrophobic web of chromatic clusters. This signatory sound, rich yet obscure, serves as the backdrop for much of his succeeding work, and is seamlessly crafted into this work. The second movement is a wraith-like slow waltz on the name of B-A-C-H (H in German notation is B, B is B flat). The waltz is the only "polystylistic" concession in the piece, and throughout the movement consistently descends back into torturous clusters.

The next two movements form the heart of the work, pulling it increasingly inward. Schnittke explains that they "are real experiences of grief which I would prefer not to comment on because they are of a very personal nature." Both movements bind themselves in shells of stasis; each movement suffers its own shocked outburst and epiphany. Eventually the fourth movement ruptures the thick web of chromaticism that seems to paralyze the work.

After its crushing, cathartic crisis on a single, repeated note, the movement ebbs into the work's final bars, based on a 14-measure theme repeated 14 times in the piano. Over this theme, Schubert-like in its studied rusticity, one hears blanched recollections of previous passages; everything liquefies as it materializes, swept along by the piano theme's current. Eventually a faded reconciliation emerges and the strings are silenced; the work ends on the sonic outskirts as Schnittke instructs the pianist to play tonlos, "without tone."

There is hyper-sentimentality in Schnittke's quintet, a weird excess of morose emotion that exists in few other of his works. Somehow the sentimentality works here, perhaps because of the sincerity of the utterance, perhaps because, despite wearing his heart on his sleeve, Schnittke is not merely personal but also highly idiosyncratic. The work is an uncomfortable twentieth century classic, and a key to Schnittke's music in general.

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

[madaboutmahler]

Awesome, Daniel! Glad you enjoyed Symphony No. 3. I'm always happy to give you recommendations in hope that find something you really enjoy and looks like Schnittke was sure fire hit!

Give this a listen next whenever you get the chance (I think you'll like it):

http://www.youtube.com/v/0g4RFX_RLS0

Thanks, John!! Schnittke was certainly a fire hit!!
Faust Cantata has just finished.... well, I am blown away yet again by Schnittke's awesomeness! Es geschah was actually the first piece of Schnittke I properly listened to, repeatedly of course, so to hear it in context was fantastic. What a climax it is! All of the piece is just amazing, I am just mesmerized. Ending the whole piece with a solo wood block dying away, what a statement.... INCREDIBLE stuff. As you can see by how unclear my writing is here, I am speechless!

Will listen to the Ritual this evening, John, after repeating the cantata I reckon!

You've put Daniel in a Schnitt-koma.


(This is a good thing btw)   

   

[Mirror Image]

Thanks, John!! Schnittke was certainly a fire hit!!
Faust Cantata has just finished.... well, I am blown away yet again by Schnittke's awesomeness! Es geschah was actually the first piece of Schnittke I properly listened to, repeatedly of course, so to hear it in context was fantastic. What a climax it is! All of the piece is just amazing, I am just mesmerized. Ending the whole piece with a solo wood block dying away, what a statement.... INCREDIBLE stuff. As you can see by how unclear my writing is here, I am speechless!

Will listen to the Ritual this evening, John, after repeating the cantata I reckon!

Yeah, Faust Cantata is a stunning work no doubt about it. I'd love to have known how Schnittke came up with these musical ideas and where he drew his inspiration from. The book A Schnittke Reader which features essays on music written by the man himself is only one fraction of the puzzle. The negative aspect of this book was that Schnittke didn't discuss his music much at all but rather the music of other composers. It's still an interesting read and worth picking up at some point.

As you know, his music didn't sit well with the Soviet government and, though, he didn't have quite the problems Shostakovich had under Stalin's reign, he still had his fair share of difficulties. His music was banned on many occasions along with composers like Denisov and Gubaidulina.

[TheGSMoeller]

With as much Schnittke listening as I've done, I still have yet to hear the enter Faust Cantata.
Any recs on the best performance?

[Mirror Image]

With as much Schnittke listening as I've done, I still have yet to hear the enter Faust Cantata.
Any recs on the best performance?

James DePreist on BIS and Rozhdestvensky on Melodyia are excellent performances, Greg. The DePreist is an excellent recording overall as it contains some great works and performances like Ritual, Passacaglia, and (K)ein Sommernachtstraum with Segerstam as couplings to Faust Cantata. The Rozhdestvensky does contain the best performance of Concerto Grosso No. 2 I've heard, so just buy them both!

[not edward]

With as much Schnittke listening as I've done, I still have yet to hear the enter Faust Cantata.
Any recs on the best performance?

I'd go for Rozhdestvensky, personally, for the more "Russian" sound and the extra wildness at points, though DePriest is still good. I haven't heard the Boreyko recording, though.

Technically speaking there's a fourth recording of the cantata in the form of the third act of the opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten under Gerd Albrecht, but I think it's probably the weakest of the three I've heard.

[Drasko]

I'd go for both DePreist and Rozhdestvensky, if that is not too much. DePreist is in German, Rozhdestvensky in Russian, and different language gives the piece bit of different overall tone, at least to me. If I'd to go for one I'd go for German, version in Russian gives me slight Les Noces tinge that I'm not sure I'm keen on, but it's quite possibly just me. Both are generally superb, though, won't make a mistake with either. I haven't heard the Boreyko.

[TheGSMoeller]

Great! Thanks to John, Drasko and Edward for the recs. 

[Sergeant Rock]

Es geschah was actually the first piece of Schnittke I properly listened to, repeatedly of course

That's the part Mrs. Rock insists I encore, over and over    We heard it four times this afternoon.

Sarge

[madaboutmahler]

That's the part Mrs. Rock insists I encore, over and over    We heard it four times this afternoon.

Sarge

We should start a competition to see who can encore it the most! I reckon I listened to it around 15 times within 2 hours on the first day I heard it! :p

[Mirror Image]

...making this Schnittkian so proud!!!!

[Mirror Image]

Check this out Daniel if you haven't heard this particular performance already:

http://www.youtube.com/v/6mJ4-ChAVnM

[Mirror Image]

Bought this earlier today:



Thanks Edward for bringing this one to my attention. I've been longing for another performance of Hymns.

[Mirror Image]

Listen to this when you have time, Daniel:

http://www.youtube.com/v/JvlN5pp1kBE

Schnittke had an uncanny way with rhetoric -- almost a kind of disorder one might venture to say. It was at work in both his music and his words, and almost always had the effect of turning things wildly upside-down: in a flash, the elevated would fall terribly low, or something of gravest seriousness would suddenly crackle into high farce. It could seem as if Schnittke were trying to say the right thing, but his temperature dials were awry: the salads came out hot, the ice-cream was boiling.

Take for instance Schnittke's casual reminiscence of the creation of his ballet from 1971, Labyrinths. The five-movement, 40-minute, formidably involved score (for chamber orchestra) was written at the behest of Russian ballet-master Vladimir Vasiliev, who had grand plans for a large, episodic competition piece of substantial avant-garde metier, eventually for performance at the Bolshoi Theater. Alas, not much came of the ambitious project: the large first movement was performed with little rehearsal time at competition, after which the dance company broke up and Vasiliev, along with his wife and partner went abroad, apparently for good. Schnittke makes light of the fall-through, noting that upon seeing Vasiliev in New York in the early 1990s, the choreographer completely failed to recall the whole endeavor. But Schnittke's take is pricelessly odd, a thick grand-guignol lacquer on an otherwise matte statement of resignation: "Once again the 'corpse of an idea' remained lying in the cellar of oblivion."

The music to the ballet itself is strangely similar in its mixture of the simplistic and dauntingly sophisticated, the naive and the learned, and the funny and scary; indeed, while the score is not one of Schnittke's better known works, Labyrinths does provide a veritable maze of figures, moods, and techniques which would become archetypes in Schnittke's later output. The first movement's carnivalesque haunted house of timbres founds itself on the Schnittke "continuo" group, a pearly amalgam of keyboard instruments (piano, celesta, harpsichord) and percussion instruments (marimba, vibraphone, bells, glockenspiel) which blend into a sonic hall of mirrors. So effective in the score's long and disquietingly atmospheric first movement, these sounds would undergo greater invention in Schnittke's Second and Fourth Symphonies (1979, 1984), and indeed provide the conceptual spine for Schnittke's last great ballet, 1987's Peer Gynt. Here Schnittke realizes he's onto something, and creates a 15-minute last movement whose monolithic progression simply builds upon this unadorned, reverberant sound-world; the climax, resounding rich major thirds, recalls the work's opening gesture, and does so with marvelous equivocality -- is this joy? Stricken terror? Again, the rhetoric loopiness maintains a poker-face.

The middle three movements are all inventions and developments of a single mood or process. They are for the most part rapid and scherzo-like accumulations, both on the sonic level (layers of sounds accrue, dynamic and timbral screens grow from transparencies into great blocks), and on level of anxiety -- the rhetorical inversion here happens with deft seamlessness, as the playful flies fast into the terrifying.

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

[Karl Henning]

Brian is right, this is a fine post.  [cross-posted here, as our Schnittke plays a supporting role]

[Mirror Image]

I might be turning my Dad into a Schnittkian as well. I played him the Credo movement from Requiem and he LOVED it! He said "Very inventive use of a rock rhythm." I told him this was a good example of Schnittke's polystylistic approach.

[Mirror Image]

I guess Daniel has fallen into the abyss!