Alfred Schnittke (photograph taken in Moscow on April 6, 1989 by © Dmitri N. Smirnov, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
This morning, after refreshing my recollections of the violin sonatas of Sergei Prokofiev while preparing to write about a forthcoming performance of his Opus 94a (second) violin sonata in D major at the San Francisco Conservatory, I realized that, in my Gidon Kremer anthology of chamber music, the all-Prokofiev CD was followed by one which began with a string trio by Alfred Schnittke. I honestly do not remember when I first encountered Schnittke, but it was definitely a “shock to the system.” Indeed, the shock was so strong that, when I was living in Singapore during the first half of the Nineties, I tended to keep my Schnittke CDs “under wraps.” Nevertheless, when I attended Mstislav Rostropovich’s recital in Singapore, I took comfort in the fact that his program included Schnittke’s “Suite in the Old Style” (in an arrangement for cello and piano).
Schnittke had a particular knack for taking the rhetoric of nostalgia and transforming it from the sentimental to the sarcastic. My guess is that most of those in the Singapore audience gave little thought to those rhetorical undercurrents. Rostropovich’s appearance was an “event;” and that was all that mattered. Mind you, while I was there, I had a friend (American) who clearly knew more about music than I did; but we tended to avoid any “deep end” discussions. He had his work as a teacher, and I had mine as an information technology researcher. I did not want to overstep my bounds, and I doubt that he wanted to either.
Now that I live in San Francisco, I can listen to as much Schnittke as I wish without worrying about the “context of my situation.” Ironically, it has been over a decade since I was able to attend a concert performance of his music. According to my archives, that would have been in May of 2011, back when Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was Music Director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra (and when I was writing for Examiner.com). She was bold enough to couple his “Moz-Art á la Haydn” with Edward Elgar’s Opus 47, the allegro movement preceded by an introduction scored for full string ensemble and a string quartet of soloists. If any cobwebs had collected in my mind due to too much “conventional” listening, they were definitely blown away by the Schnittke offering!
This morning I had a similar experience with that string trio, which Schnittke had composed in 1985. By that time, his music was beginning to receive worldwide attention, thanks not only to Kremer but also to cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky. However, what struck me the most was not just the attentiveness to that trio by Kremer performing with violist Tabea Zimmermann and Heinrich Schiff on cello. Rather, it was how the three of them could sound like a full string ensemble. This probably was due to a richness in multi-string bowing, suggesting that all the resulting notes had to come from more than three players!
Sadly, Schnittke’s music did not fill an entire CD in Kremer’s anthology. The CD was roughly divided between Schnittke and Carl Maria von Weber. Mind you, that collection was released decades after Schnittke had died; and I have no idea how much say Kremer had in how the it was produced. Nevertheless, given Schnittke’s prankish reflections on “the old style” (which were originally scored for viola d’amore, harpsichord, and a fair amount of percussion … enough for two performers), I suspect that his spirit would have been amused by the partnership!
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