Schnittke, Alfred. 1934-1998

[teamsaint]

Only one Proms performance ever of one of his symphonies, ( No 2 in 1980). Just 5 performances of any of his works listed on Bachtrack for the rest of 2018.

Is he falling into neglect, Hindemith style ?

Anything you like, recommend, can't get your head round, would love to hear performed live ?

[Stanfordian]

Only one Proms performance ever of one of his symphonies, ( No 2 in 1980). Just 5 performances of any of his works listed on Backtrack for the rest of 2018.

Is he falling into neglect, Hindemith style ?

Anything you like, recommend, can't get your head round, would love to hear performed live ?

Hiya teamsaint,

Yes, I think Schnittke's music is out of vogue. Maybe Henze's music is experiencing a similar fate too. In many ways the more fashionable a body of music sounds and feels connected to a particular era the quicker it becomes dated, rather like Tippett's operas. Without planning it I've just realised the music of all three composer's I've mentioned are associated in many ways with the 1960s and 70s and were especially prominent then.

[Richard Barrett]

New recordings of music by Henze are coming out almost every month and there's a new series of Tippett symphonies on the way too, whereas I don't think anything like that could be said for Schnittke. I don't usually find Schnittke's music easy to get on with because I generally don't appreciate music which leans so heavily on references to other music, although there are a couple of exceptions - the viola concerto and 8th symphony spring to mind.

[greenilex]

A friend in Moscow sent me the Melodiya disc (1989) of AS’s concerto grosso no.2 with full orchestra and Rozhdestvensky.

Liked it a lot at the time, and have hung on to it, though none of my turntables is functioning.

[Stanfordian]

New recordings of music by Henze are coming out almost every month and there's a new series of Tippett symphonies on the way too, whereas I don't think anything like that could be said for Schnittke. I don't usually find Schnittke's music easy to get on with because I generally don't appreciate music which leans so heavily on references to other music, although there are a couple of exceptions - the viola concerto and 8th symphony spring to mind.

Releases do come in bursts but of course recordings and concert programmes are very, very different. Naxos seems to be recording everything that has ever been written, but none can persuade me that Henze and Tippett are established in the concert hall. You only have to look at the general conservatism of concert hall programmes, it's to do with bums on seats. Orchestras will generally shy away from non-core items. I recall Sir Mark Elder with the Halle having to put Adams' Harmonielehre, with a very popular work so as not to harm revenue. In these challenging economic times I actually think that concert programmes are being even more conservative as illustrated by the new season programmes that I have just been sent by Staatskapelle Dresden, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunk etc.

[Richard Barrett]

none can persuade me that Henze and Tippett are established in the concert hall.

Neither are 80% of Haydn's symphonies for that matter! Being "established in the concert hall", with the conservatism of concert programming as it is, is something not accorded to very many 20th century composers (let alone 21st). The point I was making was that however "obscure" Henze and Tippett might be in that context, Schnittke seems to be considerably more so at the moment.

More generally, though, the "challenging economic times" aren't the result of there somehow being less money in the world, which is manifestly not the case, but that (as you imply with your mention of "revenue" in your Mark Elder example) the "bottom line" has become increasingly the measure of success in terms of concert giving, because culture is deliberately starved of funding under neoliberal ideology. That's a whole other discussion of course!

[Pulcinella]

Very little in my CD collection, not least because I gave away some I didn't get on with; but on ts's recommendation, I reclaimed the Naxos version of the Piano Quintet (the one on the all-Schnittke CD, not the one coupled with Shostakovich that got a slightly better review) and will give it a spin.
The other pieces I have and quite like are
Cello concerto 1 (BIS: Thedéen/DNRSO/Segerstam)
Viola concerto (EMI: Zimmermann/Jerusalem SO/Shallon)
Concerto grosso 1 (DG compilation: COE/Schiff)

[edashtav]

Very little in my CD collection, not least because I gave away some I didn't get on with; but on ts's recommendation, I reclaimed the Naxos version of the Piano Quintet (the one on the all-Schnittke CD, not the one coupled with Shostakovich that got a slightly better review) and will give it a spin.
The other pieces I have and quite like are
Cello concerto 1 (BIS: Thedéen/DNRSO/Segerstam)
Viola concerto (EMI: Zimmermann/Jerusalem SO/Shallon)
Concerto grosso 1 (DG compilation: COE/Schiff)

My shelves heave with Schnittke CDs. I wonder whether the premature death a couple of years ago of his chief protagonist in this country : Alexander Ivashkin who created the Alfred Schnittke Archive at Goldsmith’s College , a polymath who was such a fine scholar, lecturer, performer and advocate has contributed to the recent neglect of Schnittke’s music both in the Concert Hall and on disc?

[jayne lee wilson]

Greetings, Ed! Lovely to see you around again....

Too much going on here, and IRL, to say as much as I'd like, but there is the significant point about how Schnittke's Symphonies changed drastically with the extraordinary 1988 5th ("Concerto Grosso NO.4/Symphony No.5" - it starts as the one and evolves seamlessly into the other); this was the first truly integrated Symphony he wrote after the much more experimentally eclectic, expansive or discursive first 4, and is quite simple a titanic, tragic post-Mahlerian masterpiece, full of individual anguish amid the sense of universal collapse; whether of cities or civilisations....

Schnittke suffered his first stroke (of several) in 1985, was in a coma and even declared dead more than once; and this changed his music profoundly. After the cataclysmic 5th, the symphonies 6-8 are terrifyingly bleak, remote and almost alien, yet often intensely lyrical utterances. They explore a uniquely dark inner world, a mind struggling to come to terms with what has happened to it, and the strange, distorted world it now perceives; always seemingly beyond the listener's grasp, yet compelling her to return...

[Serial_Apologist]

Schnittke, Alfred (1934 - 1998)

Mr Schnittke is this week's Composer of the Week (30/07/18 - 3/08/18), and it therefore seemed opportune to start a thread of his own. I have to say that, genius and greatest Russian composer post-Shostakovitch or not, following an early admiration going back to when over here we first heard of him, I quickly started to get diminishing returns and to find far too much me-me-me in his polystylistic greed [sic]. That was until today, when I got to hear several works I had not heard previously, such as the early Prokofievian first VC, though I knew the extravagent first symphony before.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I've never much liked Schnittke's work, so listened more in hope than expectation to today's programme. At first, I thought the light might have dawned with the first piece (nice and Lutoslawskian, if no great shakes) and the scherzo from the Violin Concerto (nice and Shostakovichesque, if no great shakes). But then the Violin Sonata reminded me why I've avoided this Music. The idea of the Symphony sounded fun, but the Music we heard was nice and Ivesian, if no great shakes.

And I wasn't thrilled by whoever wrote Don's script - the obsession of some Western commentators for dreary, self-pitying Russians is an interesting subject in itself. But "the second greatest composer of the Soviet era"? What's Prokofiev got to do with it?

("Oh, alright, the Third Greatest"; "What's Ustvolskaya got to do with it?" - "Oh, alright, the Fourth"; "What's Weinberg got to do with it?" - "The Fifth?"; "Gubaidulina" - "The Sixth?"; "Possibly, but there's probably someone I've forgotten/don't know about". )

Still, good to have the opportunity to re-assess the work of the Eighth or Ninth greatest composer of the Soviet Era - even if/because it ends up confirming my previous assessment.

[vinteuil]

.

.... grateful for comments above - I think then I might risk it and save five hours of listening this week. I do have other things to do, you know!


.

[Richard Barrett]

Collage-type "polystylistic" stuff generally doesn't appeal to me, and as a result I find most of Schnittke's work quite annoying. However there are two works which I do return to: the Eighth Symphony and the Viola Concerto. I find those two so impressive that at one point a few years back I made a fairly extensive survey of his entire recorded oeuvre to see if I could find anything else as attractive to me, but I didn't.

[Pianoman]

I do like the Piano Quintet - probably because a lot of it sounds like what Shostakovich might have gone on to write...)

The First Symphony is good fun in parts but way too long and indulgent for me. I quite like the Piano Concerto, but I tried a recent 'recommendation', the Psalms of Repentance and found the same problems of over-indulgence and lack of memorable material.

[jayne lee wilson]

There is the significant point about how Schnittke's Symphonies changed drastically with the extraordinary 1988 5th ("Concerto Grosso NO.4/Symphony No.5" - it starts as the one and evolves seamlessly into the other); this was the first truly integrated Symphony he wrote after the much more experimentally eclectic, expansive or discursive first 4, and is quite simple a titanic, tragic post-Mahlerian masterpiece, full of individual anguish amid the sense of universal collapse; whether of cities or civilisations....

Schnittke suffered his first stroke (of several) in 1985, was in a coma and even declared dead more than once; and this changed his music profoundly. After the cataclysmic 5th, the symphonies 6-8 are terrifyingly bleak, remote and almost alien, yet often intensely lyrical utterances. They explore a uniquely dark inner world, a mind struggling to come to terms with what has happened to it, and the strange, distorted world it now perceives; always seemingly beyond the listener's grasp, yet compelling her to return…

***
I identify closely with the symphonies 6-8... a kind of alien-planet scorched-earth symphonism, speaking to extremes of mood and experience. But with heartbreakingly beautiful moments of song, the lyrical memory breaking free in the present..... the 7th is exceptional in its concision and ruthless, century-resonant irony.
Something about the finale of the Schnittke 7th which I've never seen noted anywhere - that theme which appears on horns (track 7, after 2'30 on the Otaka CD) and then on tuba solo later (sounding like a rather gloomy variation of "On Top of Old Smokey", gloomy enough as it is... ) is surely the same theme from the 5th Symphony's 2nd Movement, i.e. the Mahler juvenilia quote from GM's early Piano Quartet; it seems to have meant a lot to Schnittke.

***
Schnittke
Symphony No.2 "St. Florian". USSRMofCC Choir/Leningrad PO/Rozhdestvensky. Melodiya CD 1982/1990.

Not sure why I avoided this work for so long... slow-moving throughout an hour, early discouragement with the BBC one perhaps?
One can make too much of Schnittke's polystylism, his savage classical pastiche.

The St. Florian is in fact quite pure of utterance, and I’ve become very fond of it recently; moments like the orchestra's gentle entry after the quiet, pure, liturgical chorus in the Kyrie, which I can only describe as dimly glittering with its tuned percussion are very haunting, then the violence begins to threaten and the gargoyles seem to curse...
It really is some piece, which can only be taken "on its own terms" as an ancient liturgical mass with orchestral commentary. The two strands do eventually cut across each other, and when the resurrexit is sung, unaccompanied, with extraordinary reponsorial echo effects, it sounds at once archetypal and modern.

(This green-fronted Melodiya CD sounds much fresher and sharper than any of those versions (all of this same recording) currently offered for streaming on Qobuz - three (!) with different couplings and covers…)