Schnittke 9

The third album on The Cleveland Orchestra’s label follows the ‘old-new’ pairing of their previous release, showcasing recordings of Prokofiev and Schnittke that cover both pre- and post-pandemic music making.

Upon his emergence in the West in the early 1980s, Alfred Schnittke became one of the most talked-about, recorded, and influential composers of the last decades of the twentieth century. Schnittke was born in 1934 in the Soviet Union to German parents. After living for several years in Vienna, he returned to Moscow to attend the Conservatory from 1953-1958. He returned there to teach instrumentation from 1962 through 1972. Thereafter, splitting his time between Moscow and Hamburg, he supported himself as a film composer.

This is the second album pairing Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt from the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. The first, released in 2018, brought the group a Gramophone Award, and the BIS label and conductor Kaspars Putniņš have apparently decided to stick with what works. Both albums are superb. Schnittke and Pärt haven't often appeared together on recordings, Schnittke's stylistically allusive language being miles away from Pärt's minimalism, a fine example of which is provided by the Seven Magnificat Antiphons heard here.

The Danish String Quartet’s Grammy-nominated Prism project links Bach fugues, late Beethoven quartets and works by modern masters. In volume two of the series, Bach’s Fugue in Bb minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier (in the arrangement by Viennese composer Emanuel Aloys Förster) is brought together with Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 130 and Alfred Schnittke’s String Quartet No.3 (composed in 1983). As the quartet explains, “A beam of music is split through Beethoven’s prism. The important thing to us is that these connections be experienced widely. We hope the listener will join us in the wonder of thee beams of music that travel all the way from Bach through Beethoven to our own times.”

Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt lived through times of remarkable change in the last decades of the Soviet Union. From the 1970s, state restrictions on religion were gradually relaxed and this was reflected in the arts and especially in music. Schnittke’s adoption of Christianity was triggered by the death of his mother in 1972, and culminated in his later conversion to Catholicism. Pärt was from a nominally Lutheran background in Estonia, but embraced the Orthodox faith in the 1970s, following intensive study of liturgical music. Both composers began to incorporate religious themes into their work, moving away from the modernist abstraction that had characterized their early careers.

Established in Moscow in 1945, and still performing today, the Borodin Quartet sustains a distinctive tradition in the interpretation of Russian chamber music. Over the decades its members – all trained at the Moscow Conservatory – have inevitably changed, but the ensemble’s identity has remained cohesive, its philosophy and aesthetic embodying an entire musical culture. The quartet’s close association with Dmitri Shostakovich has gone down in history, and his chamber works are central to this 8CD collection which, offering music by a succession of Russian composers from Borodin himself to Schnittke, spans the 19th and 20th centuries.

DG has put together a very smart reissue here. "Concerto grosso 1" and "Quasi una sonata" for violin and chamber orchestra were originally released in 1989. "Concerto grosso 5" has been rescued from its original 1993 release back-to-back with a Glass piece, and is now united with the other Kremer performances of Schnittke.

Diese CD bietet eine breite Palette russischer Komponisten, die in der Tradition orthodoxer Kirchenmusik komponierten. Sie reicht von Michail Glinka, Peter Tschaikowsky, Sergej Tanejew und Sergej Rachmaninoff bis zu Alfred Schnittke und Sofia Gubaidulina, von romantisch-expressiven Vertonungen bis zu den expressiven Klängen der beiden neueren Komponisten.

Despite the poor choice of couplings, this disc contains outstanding performances of both major works. The Clinton-Narboni Duo on Elan recently set the standard in Martinu's wonderful Concerto for Two Pianos, but this performance is every bit as good, and happily quite different. Rather than the chamber orchestra featured on Elan, Genova and Dimitrov enjoy the backing of a full ensemble, and what they sacrifice in the finer points of harmonic detail (evident, for example, at the opening of the finale) they more than make up for in sheer adrenalin. The very natural balances also pay major dividends in the atmospheric textures of the long central slow movement.