Schnittke Sketches

In 1978 Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) wrote the incidental music for a production of The Inspectors Tale, an adaptation for stage of Gogols Dead Souls. It was to have been directed by Yuri Lyubimov, but the Soviet government banned the production. A suite was assembled from the score by Gennadi Rozhdenstvensky, and two leading colleagues of Schnittke - Gubaidulina and Denisov contributed a jointly composed march, which opens this CD. In 1985 the music was choreographed, the ballet, called Esquisses was performed at the Bolshoi. Schnittke composed a number of new pieces for this production. The characters in the action are all from Gogol, but in addition to The Dead Souls, we meet Tchitchikov, Major Kovalyovs Nose, and Ferdinand VIII from Notes of a Madman. A passage from the book is recited in his piece, and is read by the conductor on this CD. The music is a poly-stylistic, with a huge orchestra (2 electric guitars, flexatone, prepared piano with coins inserted between the strings), quotations from Beethoven, Haydn, Tchaikovsky - all with a sense of devilish mischief which suites ideally the grotesque nature of many of Gogols characters.

Alfred Schnittke’s chamber music comprises a dozen works which include four string quartets (released in 2011 by ATMA with Molinari Quartet, Chamber Music vol. 1 ACD2 2634), as well as the three works featured on this volume 2.

Gidon Kremer avoids the well-trodden paths of the musical world as he explores it with styleand sensitivity. Harnoncourt's fellow researcher, Argerich's soulmate, an early champion ofSchnittke and Pärt - Kremer combines a passion for freedom with a quest for authenticity, as isrevealed in the recordings he made over a period of two decades for EMI, Teldec and Erato.

The music of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov is a unique and delicate tapestry of dramatic and emotional textures, that freely alludes to the entire history of music. "I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists," Silvestrov has said. Beginning his creative career in the radical Soviet Avant-Garde, Silvestrov demonstrated an almost painful sensitivity to the intimacy that music can create between performer and listener. Silvestrov would later refute his modernist roots, saying “the most important lesson of the Avant-Garde is to be free of all conceived ideas, particularly those of the Avant-Garde” and began composing a series of works entitled “Postludium” that initiated the elegiac, poetic and highly personal relationship with silence which has come to characterize his most recent music. Haenssler Classic is proud to present pianist Jenny Lin in the World Premiere Recording of Silvestrov’s “Three Postludes”, a work composed especially for her.