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1. Concerto for cello & orchestra No.2 39:22
2. In Memoriam, for orchestra (orchestral version of the Piano Quintet) 25:30
Mstislav Rostropovich - Cello
Seiji Ozawa - Conductor
London Symphony Orchestra
AMG:"Alfred Schnittke's Second Cello Concerto is a leviathan of a work, in size, length, scope, and difficulty. This may reflect the work's occasion: it realizes Schnittke's 16-year ambition to write a work for the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. This ambition was of course thwarted until 1986 by Rostropovich's exile from Soviet Russia; while the cellist was not allowed back in Russia, Schnittke was not allowed to travel to Rostropovich's West.
Thus, the Second Cello Concerto represents a seal of friendship. However, it also carries the scar of political oppression, something Schnittke makes explicit in the work's massive fifth and final movement. This movement, a passacaglia (originally a Baroque form based on a repeating bass pattern), uses as its ground bass a theme from Schnittke's 1974 film score to Elim Klimov's Agony. Schnittke's description of the film is extremely telling: it 'portrays the final weeks of Russia which preceded the more than 70-year-long night in the country's history.'
Perhaps this political 'sub-plot' begins to explain the Second Cello Concerto's epic stature, and the nature of its sobriety. The work is constructed in five large movements; the opening Moderato serves more as prelude to the storm, announcing the soloist with a desperate but regal twelve-tone line. As others have noted, the mirror-like contour of this melody invokes Alban Berg's 1935 Violin Concerto; both themes carry a sphinxian sense of opening and closing on themselves without letting up their mystery. Eventually the cello's line is attacked by snarling brass, and soon after the bizarre second movement begins.
Intensely difficult, the large-scale Allegro forces the soloist through an unending serpentine line; the cellist's music is not lyrical, however, but angular and gnarled - less like melody than a perpetual thread of musical litanies. Amidst this painful contortionism, the huge orchestra splits into smaller groups of garish color and texture. They antagonize the soloist much like those nasty, lovingly crafted goblins in Bosch paintings; they are embodied here in the chromatic crunchings of a harpsichord, a quivering flexatone, and a spastic contra-bassoon. Three times the orchestra quashes the cello with apoplectic eruptions based on the soloist's opening mirror motive, articulating a sensation of individual and imposter, of false-doubles and the anxiety they enforce.
This ineffable sense of catastrophe becomes more palpable in the slow third movement. This Lento moves with great lyrical introspection, its gaunt lines and ambivalent harmony lending a dark elegance to its sound. Yet musical mirrors and imposters abound; the soloist's line is consistently echoed in inversion by the orchestra, reflecting the cello's warm vocality in the steely blur of bells and glockenspiel. Likewise, the cello itself passes through reflective borders, from empty soloistic dimensions into a claustrophobic chamber of throbbing string quarter tones.
A solo recitative leads into the brutal Allegretto vivo fourth movement, where the orchestra's rage is finally given full voice. A screeching climax leads into the extraordinary last movement, based on the Agony-score. Schnittke calls this music a 'sound-world,' implying less a musical movement than a ghostly process of inhabitance and gradual change. The cello spins a line of endless, merciless transformation, like a demented singer long having forgotten the actual melody; the orchestra all the while grows like a rich, terrifying infestation, and eventually crushes the soloists with supreme density. Amidst this hysterical proliferation of musical ideas, so evocative of paranoia and madness (and thus perhaps of Rasputin himself), the cello never ceases. Even in the concerto's smoldering last bars its sings into the void, 'the ever-darkening orchestral sound transforming the moment into an inaudible, eternal reverberation'.
In Memoriam is actually an orchestral arrangement of Alfred Schnittke's Piano Quintet of 1976. The request to orchestrate this extraordinary chamber work came from Schnittke's close friend and staunch supporter, Russian conductor Gennadi Rozdestvensky. Rozdestvensky had moved mountains three years before to get Schnittke's First Symphony performed in the tiny town of Gorki - a watershed moment in the composer's career and in Russian music history; perhaps the import of this friendship propelled Schnittke to set the private quintet on the orchestra stage.
The Piano Quintet itself is a dark, heavy planet of sorts. Even in the midst of Schnittke's bewilderingly prolific output, this extremely introspective work commands a massive gravity; it seems to orient, arrange, and set in motion so many of Schnittke's works, before and after. If one wants to locate the founding trauma for such a consistently agonizing body of artistic work, it is most likely the Piano Quintet.
This centrality may owe much to the quintet's function, conceived as a memorial to the composer's mother, who died in September 1972 of a stroke. It is a work whose substance was drawn from a real event, entirely tangible and irrevocable - in many ways different from Schnittke's other, more brazenly public works of the time. This shift caused the composer tremendous difficulty. After finishing a first movement very quickly, Schnittke was paralyzed, 'unable to continue because I had to take what I wrote from an imaginary space defined in terms of sound and put it into the psychological space as defined by life, where excruciating pain seems almost unserious, and one must fight for the right to use dissonance, consonance, and assonance.' Hence the quintet was shelved, and not resumed until almost four years later.
While it seems strange that Schnittke would have orchestrated such an intimate work, In Memoriam still carries a tremendous impact. The signature sound that Schnittke was perfected in the quintet - a dense, claustrophobic, pathetic web of chromatic clusters - is magnified in In Memoriam. Moreover, while an effective claustrophobia is lost with such large forces, a new expressivity arises from the orchestra's color and mass.
Schnittke decided to treat the orchestra much as an expanded piano quintet, with the string section taking over the role of string quartet. The piano's music, however, is now expanded by the colors of the winds, brass, and a large percussion section. Most importantly, many piano passages are now performed by vibraphone; this glassy, hallucinatory sound is another Schnittke hallmark. Finally, certain crucial passages include the organ, whose weight and symbolism add much to the piece.
The first two movements of In Memoriam do not differ substantially from the chamber version. The second movement spins out a wraith-like slow waltz on the name of B-A-C-H (H in German notation is B, B is B-flat), but constantly descends back into torturous clusters.
The next two movements, however, are intensified in novel ways. Together they form the dark heart of the work, drawn from the composer's 'real experiences of grief which I would prefer not to comment on because they are of a very personal nature.' Extremely static in the chamber work, these movements attain a new action, reinforced by organ and bells at climaxes.
After the cathartic crisis on a single repeated note, the fourth movement ebbs into the work's final bars, based on a fourteen-bar theme repeated fourteen times in the organ. Over this Schubert-like theme of studied peasantry, we hear blanched recollections of previous passages, materializing and liquefying, swept along by the organ's current of reconciliation."
Cello Concerto No.2 / In Memoriam Scans
