Alfred Schnittke: Seeking the Soul

Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 21 January 2001

(Schnittke actually said “The goal of my life is to unify “E” and “U” even if I break my neck in so doing!”, “E” being Ernste Musik, “U” being Unterhaltungsmusik.)

You knew they were die-hard Schnittke fans. Nobody coughed …

Alfred Schnittke said that his goal as a composer was to bridge the gap between serious music and music for entertainment, “even if I break my neck doing it”. Today that ambition may strike us as a less literal risk than would have been the case in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and early 1980s, when Schnittke’s compositional powers were at their height.

His relationship with the grim regime was always volatile, his music at turns the object of adulation and condemnation. Officialdom governed his every move (or, more often, failure to move, since for much of his life he was forbidden from travelling outside the Soviet Union, even to hear performances of his own music). If, for most of us today, that era of Soviet state control has faded to mere reported memory, its painful legacy was felt afresh at the Barbican’s Schnittke extravaganza last weekend. Every note of his music, even at its buoyant best, carries the ironic shadow of adversity. Wit becomes a weapon.

The BBC’s annual Composer Portraits have long been a pleasurable obligation in the January calendar. Judging by the surreal silence and absence of arbitrary bronchial display which attends each concert, these marathons attract only dedicated music lovers. The joy is that this species, supposedly threatened, is determinedly alive; many of the concerts were sold out.

All were well attended and hungrily received. To spend three evenings and two days in the Barbican, or communing with Radio 3 which broadcasts the entire proceedings, requires a certain staying power. Yet the prerequisite for enjoyment is curiosity, not expertise. A sense of shared discovery unites the audience. An excellent complementary programme of talks and films (Schnittke wrote some 66 film scores) exists to fill any gaps in our knowledge. No one should feel daunted.

“Seeking the Soul” was an appropriately ambiguous title for the weekend (who was doing the seeking – the composer or his audience?). Schnittke’s chameleon ability to change mode and mood has made his musical dialectic seem unfairly elusive or superficial. A German-born Russian, a Jew who embraced Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy, throughout his life (1934-98) he sought a homeland, a place of acceptance.

His eclectic use of jazz, baroque, mainstream classical and Russian Orthodox chant, tossed together in a bubble-and-squeak of musical variety, might seem to dash any hope of finding the real Schnittke. The reverse is true. Immersion in his music, from expansive, collage-like symphonies to unadorned chamber or choral works, merely confirmed the singularity of his artistic vision. His mission, always, is to wrestle with the musical tradition he has inherited, both within Russia and beyond.

In his favoured form, the concerto grosso, he borrows from the Italian baroque, not to imitate as a neoclassicist ( à la Stravinsky) might, but to explore a type of music which Russia itself never possessed. The string quartets survey the Austro-German tradition, as if sampling Beethoven’s entire output and reconfiguring it, refining and redefining it in his own terms. The Keller Quartet gave haunting accounts of Quartets Nos. 2 and 4 in St Giles’s, Cripplegate, one of the weekend’s many highlights.

In similar vein, at the frenzied climax of the Violin Concerto No. 4, the soloist has to mime virtuosity, his bow sawing crazily above the strings, as if silenced grotesquely by his accompanists. Here, the violinist was the work’s dedicatee, the dazzling Gidon Kremer, who added spice and brilliance to several concerts during the weekend. He was accompanied by the BBCSO under Martyn Brabbins, who in the same concert negotiated the mesmerically theatrical Symphony No. 1 with assurance and skill. In this raw, explosive work, scored for huge orchestra, the players walk on stage one by one, then off, then on again, tuning frantically in parody of symphony concert conventions.

At one point, the music is interrupted by a pianist and violinist (Daniel Hope and Simon Mulligan) who come and start their own anarchic jazz improvisations while the conductor looks on, bewildered. When performed with the kind of conviction shown here, Schnittke’s anarchy achieves strange and compelling grandeur.

The BBC players, who valiantly mastered a formidable number of works for the occasion, were less secure in the late Symphony No. 8, written in 1994, four years before the composer’s death when he was already incapacitated by a series of strokes. Nevertheless, a few fluffs could not cloud the spare intensity and transparent textures of this remarkable work, here conducted by Eri Klas in its UK premiere. In the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, the BBC Singers (who performed the inspiring Choir Concerto) and BBC Philharmonic, the London Sinfonietta and a group of fine soloists, Schnittke had the best possible advocates.

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Nagasaki: Prom 52: LSO/Gergiev at the Albert Hall/Radio 3

Schnittke’s oratorio about Nagasaki was worth hearing once, but it was a relief to hear real music (Shostakovich) afterwards

Hilary Finch, The Times, 26 August 2009

Who would dare to write an oratorio about Nagasaki? Perhaps only a 24-year-old student, fired by a Soviet propaganda poet and eager to summon all his youthful strength and idealism to express the inexpressible. The best that can be said about Alfred Schnittke’s 1958 Nagasaki, an oratorio for mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra, heard in Britain for the first time at Monday’s Prom, is in the composer’s own words. This was, he said, “a very honest work … where I was absolutely sincere”.

Forget tone clusters and polystylism: this is poster art, drawn in strong, bold shapes and colours. It tips dangerously (too dangerously for authorities at the time) towards Expressionism and is heady with the language of every composer whose music touched Schnittke’s hypersensitised palate. Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Bach, Hindemith, Bartók, Stravinsky, Orff: they’re all there, jostling for position in the huge orchestral battery.

Woodwind fan the flames, pitched percussion, trombones, tuba and organ crackle with fiery anger. The London Symphony Chorus strained helplessly to find a vocal strength and focus comparable to their Russian counterparts. They chanted, grappled with Schnittke’s arduous student counterpoint, and hummed with the rising “sun of peace”. Elena Zhidkova “walked quietly on this scorched land”, rather as Prokofiev’s lonely woman trod the icy battlefields in Alexander Nevsky. And an electronic theremin wailed amid the numb radiation of celesta and piano. With its hideously inadequate orchestral explosion and its distancing rhetoric, this Nagasaki was worth hearing — perhaps, and just once.

It was a relief to hear real music and profound responses after the interval. Valery Gergiev conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony that was searingly powerful in its raw energy and cumulative strength.