Alfred Schnittke - Concerto Grosso No.1

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Composer: Alfred Schnittke (24 November 1934 -- 3 August 1998)
- Orchestra: Chamber Orchestra of Europe
- Conductor: Heinrich Schiff
- Soloists: Gidon Kremer (violin), Tatiana Grindenko (violin), Yuri Smirnov (harpsichord), Yuri Smirnov (prepared piano)
- Year of recording: 1988

Concerto Grosso No. 1, for 2 violins, harpsichord, prepared piano & 21 strings, written in 1977.

00:00 - I. Preludio. Andante
05:01 - II. Toccata. Allegro
09:27 - III. Recitativo. Lento
16:22 - IV. Cadenza. [without tempo indication]
18:54 - V. Rondo. Agitato
26:00 - VI. Postludio. Andante - Allegro - Andante

If Alfred Schnittke is a "poster child" of musical postmodernism, his Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977) is his poster work. One of the few orchestral works written after 1945 to enter the repertoire of ensembles worldwide, its uneasy fusion of old and new, high and low, and grave and comical captures what is most Schnittkean about Schnittke. This is no mean feat: the "Schnittkean" is a quality so conflicted, so nomadic and self-deconstructing, that it is almost illusory; the second one catches up to it, it's just fallen through a trap door. Likewise, Concerto Grosso No. 1 is a high-velocity funhouse of masks. Their unveiling is uproarious and caustically black, their liveliness optimistic, but their trajectory doomed.

This unveiling is also Schnittke's central compositional strategy, something he calls "polystylism." More than mere eclecticism, "polystylism" is for Schnittke a musical last resort for building large works; it is a means for dynamic musical theater, whether comedy or tragedy; it is also, as Schnittke believes, the best way of creating successful musical tension amidst unprecedented musical freedom. And so polystylism is eclectic, but never indifferent; it always intends to confront, surprise, and subvert with utmost calculation. Hence the Schnittkean paradox: things stick together by falling apart, in exactly the right places, at exactly the right times.

- The Concerto Grosso No. 1 has already fallen apart when it begins. Though the entire complement of Baroque instrumentation is present (two violin soloists, harpsichord, prepared piano, string orchestra), the work begins with only prepared piano, sounding remarkably like a gaggle of pots and pans as it thumps through a childlike "sentimental song"; only after this foreboding "Prelude" do the other instruments enter.
- The second movement (Toccata) starts as a cutting Vivaldi parody, but quickly distends into a wall of ferocious dissonance. A hapless race through musical history begins: music-box Mozart, heroic-period Beethoven, an overwrought parody of early 12-tone Webern -- all in turn drown in a cacophonous current, an "Ur-discord" lurking behind all other styles. The movement ends with the soloists flailing mechanically amidst stabbing orchestral chords.
- Schnittke continues the Baroque concerto sequence with the ensuing slow Recitativo. Soloists and orchestra steadfastly maintain a call-and-response, but its outlines are blurred by thick chromatic clusters and a disturbing lamentation. The Recitativo eventually devolves into a slow, rising slide modeled on a scream; yet through its furious static you can perceive the real joke, as the soloists drill out licks from Tchaikovsky's famous Violin Concerto.
- An adamant but confused cadenza for the soloists leads to...
- a culminating Rondo, at which point Vivaldi barrels back into view; but so does "Grandmother Schnittke," hilariously banging out her favorite tango on, of all things, the harpsichord. The tango jumps into the fray, along with everything else, and the Rondo, model of "one-thing-after-another" musical forms, now becomes a game of "all-things-at-once." The tone is catastrophic but hardly serious, and soon enough the prepared piano shatters everything with its returning "sentimental song."
- The remaining Postlude supplies an appropriate anti-conclusion; the whole Concerto is now but floating fragments of previous motives and styles, resting on a luminous screen of string-harmonics. Schnittke here perfects his own archetypal conclusion, to permeate his next decade's work: a tone both doomed and supremely open to the future. At once epitaph and phoenix, it embraces the paradox of Schnittke's music and the magnetism of this popular work.

The concerto grosso is dedicated: "Gidon Kremer, Tatjana Gridenko und Saulus Sondeckis gewidmet".

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