Bis

Alfred Schnittke - Violin Works, Quasi una sonata & Other Works (2006) {BIS Schnittke Edition, BIS-1437} (Item #22)
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© 2006 BIS Records AB | BIS-CD-1437
Classical / Contemporary Classical / 20th Century

Early on in his career, the violin became an immensely important instrument for Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998). He developed a remarkable skill in composing for the instrument, resulting in a number of highly successful works of which several have been gathered on this disc. During the 1960s, a time when the violin was not the preferred instrument for the avant-garde as it carried too much historical ballast, Schnittke used it as tool for experimentation developing polystylism, an incorporation of historical sources or techniques into a modernistic context.
An early polystylistic work was Quasi una sonata, one of Schnittke's best-known works largely due to its narrative character; Schnittke tells a story filled with contrasts and drama.

Alfred Schnittke - Epilogue, Music for Cello & Piano (2007) {BIS Schnittke Edition, BIS-1427} (Item #23)
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© 2007 BIS Records AB | BIS-CD-1427
Classical / Contemporary Classical / 20th Century

Alfred Schnittke’s use of the elegiac voice of the cello evokes Russian musical tradition and history. His works for the cello were to a large extent inspired by his friendship and close collaboration with the exceptional musicians Mstislav Rostropovich, Alexander Ivashkin and Natalia Gutman, to all of whom he dedicated works. Rostropovich has said about the composer: ‘As far as I am concerned, the most remarkable thing about Schnittke is his all-embracing, all-encompassing genius… he uses everything invented before him. Uses it as his palette, his colours. And it is all so organic: for example, diatonic music goes side by side with complex atonal polyphony.’

Alfred Schnittke - Peer Gynt (1994) {2CD Set, BIS Schnittke Edition, BIS-677~8} (Item #17)
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© 1994 Grammofon AB BIS | BIS-CD-677~8
Classical / Contemporary Classical / 20th Century

Alfred Schnittke's score for the full length ballet, 'Peer Gynt,' is one of the orchestral masterworks of his final period. The libretto transplants Peer from the situations in Ibsen's famous play to analogous ones of the modern world. The musical universe is as far removed from the world of Grieg's famous incidental music as can be imagined. The composer's famous polystylism is used to depict the various worlds that Peer encounters along his travels–a ragtime polka for Hollywood and the film industry, a pseudo bit of Grieg for his yearnings for home, and so forth. Because of the dramatic context, the individual numbers are of manageable length, and the composer's experience as the creator of some sixty film scores comes fully into play.

Alfred Schnittke - Symphony No. 2 'St. Florian' (1994) {BIS Schnittke Edition, BIS-667} (Item #18)
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© 1994 Grammofon AB BIS | BIS-CD-667
Classical / Contemporary Classical / 20th Century

Schnittke completed this symphony in 1980. Complexity can't be the delaying factor; his Fourth Symphony also requires soloists and a choir. The Second is not as forbidding as some of the composer's other symphonies, and it strikes me one of his best, so approachability and quality don't seem to be factors, either. The work's subtitle refers to the composer's visit in 1977 to the burial place of Anton Bruckner. Schnittke was moved by the setting sun, the mysterious feel of the Baroque Church of St. Florian, and the choir singing an evening mass somewhere out of his sight. When Gennady Rozhdestvensky requested a new work from Schnittke for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he reminded the composer about his St. Florian experience, and the Second Symphony took off from there.

Alfred Schnittke - Symphonies Nos. 6 & 7 (1995) {BIS Schnittke Edition, BIS-747} (Item #19)
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© 1995 Grammofon AB BIS | BIS-CD-747
Classical / Contemporary Classical / 20th Century

Symphony No. 6. Life and work come together in a particularly disturbing way in Alfred Schnittke's Sixth Symphony. Schnittke wrote the work in 1992, after sustained his second major stroke; he suffered his first in 1985, would suffer another in 1994, and, eventually, a fourth in 1998 would take the composer's life. While Schnittke's debilitation was constant and cruel, his fortitude was more astonishing, and his post-1985 "late period" bore a tremendous spring of new music: 3 operas, 4 symphonies, 6 concerti, and many smaller works.

Alfred Schnittke - Symphony No. 8, Symphonic Prelude and For Liverpool (2005) {BIS Schnittke Edition, BIS-1217} (Item #21)
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© 2005 BIS Records AB | BIS-CD-1217
Classical / Contemporary Classical / 20th Century

The first BIS disc dedicated to the music of Alfred Schnittke was released in January 1987 – almost 20 years ago. Since then, our Schnittke Edition has qrown to 20 volumes with the present disc completing the cycle of the composer’s eight finished symphonies. (At Schnittke’s death in 1998, his Symphony No. 9 was left uncompleted.) Symphony No.8 was composed in 1994, and to some extent exemplifies Schnittke’s ambiguous position as a Russian composer of German ethnicity, combining as it does a Germanic organized structure with an intense Russian melancholy.

Roland Pöntinen is a virtuoso pianist whose busy concert and recording schedule would seem to preclude work as a composer and arranger, but he has managed to produce a substantial and worthwhile output in both those creative roles. As a pianist Pöntinen has developed a vast repertory of standards by J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Grieg, Rachmaninov, and Prokofiev, to name just some.