Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)

[kyjo]

Just listened to Cello Concerto no. 1 from the Chandos set and damn what an amazing work this is! So full of shattering power and intensity. The last four minutes or so of the 4th movement are extremely moving-almost brought a tear to my eye!

[Mirror Image]

Just listened to Cello Concerto no. 1 from the Chandos set and damn what an amazing work this is! So full of shattering power and intensity. The last four minutes or so of the 4th movement are extremely moving-almost brought a tear to my eye!

Absolutely, Kyle. Such a compelling and harrowing work. That last movement, if caught in the right mood, will no doubt bring a tear to your eye. Considering the circumstances of this concerto, it makes the feelings evoked in the music even more meaningful.

[kyjo]

Absolutely, Kyle. Such a compelling and harrowing work. That last movement, if caught in the right mood, will no doubt bring a tear to your eye. Considering the circumstances of this concerto, it makes the feelings evoked in the music even more meaningful.

According to the booklet notes, Schnittke composed this work after he had returned from the hospital, where he suffered a devastating stroke and his heart stopped three times.

[Mirror Image]

According to the booklet notes, Schnittke composed this work after he had returned from the hospital, where he suffered a devastating stroke and his heart stopped three times.

Yes, I've read this several times too but from other sources. I think I had originally read this in an interview with the composer. I'll have to see if I dig up the link for everyone here. I remember him stating that he had finished half of the work (or at least in sketches) but couldn't finish the work because he suffered that stroke. When he came back to this concerto, he mentioned that those old sketches seemed like that were written by a completely different man. Such a fascinating thing to read.

[kyjo]

Yes, I've read this several times too but from other sources. I think I had originally read this in an interview with the composer. I'll have to see if I dig up the link for everyone here. I remember him stating that he had finished half of the work (or at least in sketches) but couldn't finish the work because he suffered that stroke. When he came back to this concerto, he mentioned that those old sketches seemed like that were written by a completely different man. Such a fascinating thing to read.

Yes, I read that too. I'll definitely have to read more about Schnittke's life in general.

[Mirror Image]

Yes, I read that too. I'll definitely have to read more about Schnittke's life in general.

Yes, I'm thinking of picking of the biography written by Ivashkin, but some reviewers aren't too favorable of the book. Hell, right now, it's the only game in town unless you, or someone else, knows of another book that I don't know about.

[not edward]

It's worth mentioning that the same pre-/post-stroke dichotomy affects Peer Gynt; if I recall correctly the first three acts were written before his stroke and the Epilogue after.

As for the Ivaskin book; it's rather too hagiographical but does have useful material; I think most of the better Schnittke studies are unfortunately only in German.

[Mirror Image]

It's worth mentioning that the same pre-/post-stroke dichotomy affects Peer Gynt; if I recall correctly the first three acts were written before his stroke and the Epilogue after.

As for the Ivaskin book; it's rather too hagiographical but does have useful material; I think most of the better Schnittke studies are unfortunately only in German.

Considering Ivashkin was such an ardent promoter/defender of all things Schnittke, I can see where he might make a 'mountain out of a molehill' so to speak. I didn't realize this about Peer Gynt until you mentioned it Edward. Most interesting!

*Digs out box set of Peer Gynt...

[Mirror Image]

Bought this earlier:



Despite it's apparent warts, this will be a useful guide for me, especially since I'm such a hardcore Schnittkian now.

[Mirror Image]

Another Schnittkian classic: Cello Concerto No. 1 -

"I have no sense of the fatal inevitability of evil, even in the most terrible situations. There is no such thing..."

From the sound of his music, one would never guess that Schnittke had "no sense of the fatal inevitability of evil"; his works seem to profess a faith in disaster that would shame Beelzebub himself. And yet one gets occasional intimations that the strength required to so feverishly preach the catastrophic could only be derived from a strangely safe haven, a stance of staunch if secret optimism. Hence when Schnittke had his first major stroke in the summer of 1985, one imagines the particularly cruel toll it must have taken. Having been declared clinically dead -- his heart stopped beating three times -- Schnittke eventually recovered into an enormously creative "late phase" of composition. But something had changed in the music, almost polarized. The sick fun of doom and debacle was gone, replaced on the one hand by a more tortured and unfathomable darkness, and, on the other, by an almost sublime new simplicity, cryptic and imposing.

The First Cello Concerto is an extraordinary work just on its own merits, but also happens to have been written during the summer of 1985; it was composed both before and after the stroke, and so bears the remarkable role of fulcrum in Schnittke's career. Even more so than the celebrated Viola Concerto, completed just days before the affliction, the First Cello Concerto is a touched work.

A monumental endeavor for huge orchestra, in four movements and lasting some 40 minutes, the concerto was written for Schnittke's close friend, Russian cellist Natalia Gutman; the solo part is indeed feverish, and exhausts the performer both technically and emotionally. The work in general -- at least in its first three movements -- largely adheres to Schnittke's concerto-archetype of "I-against-the-World" (as scholar Richard Taruskin writes); the soloist ever-seeks to weave a sincere, plangent melos, to sing and weep its uninterrupted fill, and perpetually suffers both the mockery and raw violence of the orchestra. Thus the first movement founds its vast sonata-form around the conflict of soliloquy vs. blitzkrieg; the following Adagio resurrects the soloist into ephemeral lyrical fabric which is eventually stretched and torn; and the brief and bitter third movement casts the cello through a gauntlet of hopelessly fated march-pastiches and mock-heroics before obliterating itself altogether.

But then, in an uncharacteristic step, another movement follows, a broad and sweeping hymn which actually appears to transcend the brutal ruckus before it, for an almost celestial vision of fortitude. And here, impoverished by emergency, that site where the composer must stand in order to plunge into the quagmire of his mind is forced to speak itself. It is an optimism that is all the more wrenching for being so potently repressed elsewhere -- but, in its awesome fidelity to the unlikely and the graced, it is an optimism nonetheless. Schnittke himself attests to the sense of miraculous: "Suddenly I was given this finale from somewhere, and I've just written it down."

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

[kyjo]

Thanks for posting that, John. An insightful description of a remarkable work.

[Mirror Image]

Thanks for posting that, John. An insightful description of a remarkable work.

You're welcome. All Music Guide has some good articles.

[Mirror Image]

Another Schnittkian classic: String Quartet No. 2 -

In many ways, Alfred Schnittke's entire output bears the signature of tragedy. It is often a bizarre, deeply irreverent tragedy, miles from Greek antiquity. But nevertheless disaster, catastrophe, and lament are everywhere in the thousands of pages which contain Schnittke's name. So when he writes a work inspired by an actual in-the-world tragedy, it adopts a strange multi-layered hue, and offers an unremitting experience.

Schnittke's Second Quartet is the child of such trauma, finished in 1980 to memorialize the composer's close friend, film director Larissa Shepitko, who died from a car accident the previous year. Schnittke confesses that "for me, and for all who knew her, her death came as a severe blow." The quartet that resulted from Schnittke's reaction is a particularly intense experience, and while it employs much that is familiar Schnittke territory, it carries deeper wounds.

For example, Schnittke's hallmark "polystylism" comes through in the use of early Russian sacred music; Schnittke writes that "almost the entire tonal material of the quartet is derived from ancient Russian church song," known for its striking dissonance. But gone is any of the exhilarating funhouse irony which imprints Schnittke's other polystylistic works. Instead, the single model of Russian song is pressed and pulverized with increasingly agonized vehemence; Schnittke treats it monomaniacally as a symbol of the irreparably lost and unrecoverable. In doing so, however, he also writes a work of stunningly sustained creativity. Stravinsky's famous dictum runs that a composition can only arise as the solution to a problem. Schnittke the tragedian offers a counter dictum -- that a great composition can arise out of an impossible search for a solution to an insoluble problem.

The Quartet opens with the cold, isolated sound of high string-harmonics in canon, and at close intervals. Sharp and pale, this music eventually erupts into outburst; Schnittke then quotes, in all its voices, the original Russian hymn on which quartet is based, forming a kind of poignantly hollow center.
Responding to this vulnerable repose, the second movement offers an outraged, depressurizing implosion, an unrelenting explosion of activity warping the Russian hymn's contour in all ways imaginable. It begins with a "refrain" in which the hymn is expanded to four-octave arpeggios in all four instruments, each instrument flying at a slightly different velocity; the remarkable effect reminds one of a globe spinning at self-destructive speed, a kind of unstable atomic delirium barely holding itself together. At various points Schnittke operates like a film director himself, splicing in contrasting scenes of distortive fury; at one brief point this hurtling sphere smolders to a stop and we once again hear the original hymn as it appeared in the first movement. Inevitably, however, the shocked refrain returns, and ends the movement in a choked mid-spin.

This torn-off end leads immediately into the catatonic third movement, marked "Mesto" ("sad"). With equal single-mindedness but a new glacial tone, this movement offers a frozen dirge around a single note, D. Schnittke infuses the sound with a frightening thickness, which eventually swells to a barbaric climax: all four instruments, each bowing quadruple-stops, hammer out seven ffff chords.

The fourth and last movement is a kind of broken epilogue, attempting one last time to capture the missing center. But after a traumatized return to the Quartet's opening bars, Schnittke finally turns away from centers and offers a muted, translucent coda to the whole work. This starlit firmament of string harmonics literally evaporates from sound, ringing out the Russian hymn as it fades. In such a way does the work possess a double memory, of friendship, but also of heritage and history.

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

[Mirror Image]

Looks like Karlo (North Star) can be added the list of resident Schnittkians now.

I received that book on Schnittke (Phaidon Press) and I've got say I didn't expect it's presentation to look as good as it did. Lots of nice pictures (I expected just texts). Can't wait to start reading it.

[North Star]

Looks like Karlo (North Star) can be added the list of resident Schnittkians now.

Reporting for duty!

[Mirror Image]

Reporting for duty!

About-face, soldier! Forward march!

[snyprrr]

What of String Quartet No.1? I had it on the Kronos set (long gone), and remember it as fragmented and scrappy. The Borodin do it on some rare cd, with Vainberg I think?

And what of the Gutman CC1 on EMI, with Schuman? That's a nicely gothic cd all around I think.

[Parsifal]

What of String Quartet No.1? I had it on the Kronos set (long gone), and remember it as fragmented and scrappy. The Borodin do it on some rare cd, with Vainberg I think?

And what of the Gutman CC1 on EMI, with Schuman? That's a nicely gothic cd all around I think.

The government shuts down,  the snyprrr disappears.  The government re-opens, the snyprrr reappears.  It seems self-evident that the snyprrr is an artificial intelligence program program running in some sort of classified government research lab.

[Mirror Image]

What of String Quartet No.1? I had it on the Kronos set (long gone), and remember it as fragmented and scrappy. The Borodin do it on some rare cd, with Vainberg I think?

And what of the Gutman CC1 on EMI, with Schuman? That's a nicely gothic cd all around I think.

I need to re-listen to SQ No. 1. I haven't heard that Gutman recording (Masur conducting I believe), but I doubt this performance could top Ivashkin/Polyansky on Chandos.

[The new erato]

The government shuts down,  the snyprrr disappears.  The government re-opens, the snyprrr reappears.  It seems self-evident that the snyprrr is an artificial intelligence program program running in some sort of classified government research lab.

This computed until you mentioned intelligence.