Recalling a Composer’s Two Sides, Light and Dark

Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 29 April 1999

There are two warring impulses in the music of Alfred Schnittke, the Russian composer who died last year. One is a sense of humor that takes the form of peculiar juxtapositions, allusions to other composers and styles, and thwarted expectations. The other is a seemingly implacable bleakness. Some works favor one of these qualities; in others, both fight for primacy.

“Remembering Alfred Schnittke”, a tribute on Monday evening at Alice Tully Hall, put these elements in high relief. The performers were billed as the Winnipesaukee Chamber Players and represented the Lake Winnipesaukee Music Festival, in New Hampshire.

Mostly it was a family affair: Irina Schnittke, the composer’s widow, was the pianist in an energetic, mercurial account of the Third Sonata for Violin and Piano (1994). Her partner was Oleh Krysa, a violinist for whom Schnittke wrote several works. With Mr. Krysa’s son, Peter, also a violinist, and Peter’s wife, Rachel Lewis Krysa, a cellist, Mrs. Schnittke played the Piano Trio (1992), a work that has a Shostakovich-like pessimism, but also a recurring figure in which repeating arpeggios bring Philip Glass’s music to mind. In other works Tatiana Tchekina, the wife of Oleh Krysa, was the pianist. (Adrienne Sommerville, a violist, performed without apparent family ties.)

The concert began with a work by Mahler, a Piano Quartet movement, composed in 1876. Mahler, at 16, had not yet found his own voice; here he used Dvořák’s. The work was included as a preface to Schnittke’s Piano Quartet (1988), which uses Mahler’s sketches for a second movement as a springboard. The Schnittke piece begins as a work of dark consonance and grows increasingly dense and hazy before the Mahler fragment lightens the mood.

The second half of the concert was devoted to a work that showed Schnittke’s light-spirited and dark sides in equal measure, the Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Two Violins, Harpsichord, Prepared Piano and String Orchestra (1977). Ms. Tchekina brought an appealing vividness to the two keyboard parts (the prepared piano was made to sound like a Chinese percussion orchestra); Oleh and Peter Krysa played the violin lines with the flexibility necessary for its deft leaps between quasi-Baroque and searing modernist styles. And the Eastman Virtuosi, a student string orchestra, gave a polished, robust performance under the baton of Bradley Lubman.

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