The Southbank Centre's Between Two Worlds festival has brought a welcome focus to the music of Alfred Schnittke in what would have been his 75th year. In a diverse series of concerts taking place over a number of weeks, the LPO and a line-up of renowned soloists (including Alexander Ivashkin , Nikolai Lugansky, and Gautier Capuçon) perform all of Schnittke's major concert works, alongside music from composers who inspired the Russian.
Tonight's concert featured an especially cohesive programme. Schnittke's music is renowned for its parodic, eclectic traditionalism. His works tour wide ranging classical, romantic and popular sources for material, absorbing those materials into large-scale forms derived from the Austro-German tradition. The allusiveness of the music puts the validity of those forms into question, just as those forms occlude the original meaning of the material.
The music of Webern, Berg, and the later German romantics held particular importance for Schnittke. As such, the inclusion on the programme of Webern's Passacaglia and Berg's Violin Concerto made a lot of sense, particularly when one considers both works' somewhat askew versioning of romantic tropes of expansiveness and expression. Similarly, Magnus Lindberg's Chorale explores an enriched style of modelling, this work being based, as some of the rows of the Berg are, on the Bach chorale 'Es ist genug' from BWV 60. Lindberg's piece draws on Schnittke's example as the Russian had on Webern and Berg before him.
Thus the concert seemed especially of a piece. Interpretative style varied according to each work, but generally the flow of music felt cumulative and logical; each new piece seemed to build upon or question what had come before. Webern's menacing Passacaglia, from early in his career and steeped in a sense of paradox -- the presence of the extremely large ensemble for such a fragmented work, though essential for the klangfarbenmelodie that drives the piece, seemed in its peculiarity to assert the failure of romanticism just as it benefited from its advances -- was led with a real sense of architecture by Vladimir Jurowski. Some of the timings in the initial stages were confused (which one felt particularly in the laying out of the theme), but generally the performance brought deep menace and a careful sense of development to the teeming orchestral score.
Chorale demonstrates its composers particular skill for writing weighty, adamantine low brass and wind textures quite unlike any one else. The musicians brought these off with stunning heft, and they realized the rich harmonic colours with as much accomplishment as they did this dynamic mass of the score. The glistening textures of the Berg were thrilling, and in Leonidas Kavakos we had a soloist in total command; security of line and deeply-felt emotion sat alongside an intensely demonstrative sense of accent and form in his performance. The ghostly echoes of tonality, of folk and classical forms, and of romantic style (the Mahlerian scherzo had particular vehemence here) that permeate the score reflected echoes that saturated the whole evening; if we can still experience romantic musical gesture, how should that be experience be configured, and what does it mean to us today (the today of each of the scores and the today of the performance)?
These questions were again in the foreground for the exhilarating performance of Schnittke's huge and strange Symphony no. 3, which had its premiere in 1981. The work features amongst a huge orchestra electric guitar and bass, celeste, harpsichord, piano, and organ, and amongst a wide stylistic palette, elements of American dance, Schubertian piano writing, Beethovenian themes, and modernist fragmentation. The debt that Heiner Goebbels owes to Schnittke was acutely apparent throughout In their colour and their approach to texture and harmony, the opening sections anticipate Lindberg and Pintscher, even Saariaho, just as strongly as the opening movement recall, explicitly, the sort of themes and scoring one finds in Beethoven and Brahms. From the steamrolling central movements to the potent gloaming of the finale, the orchestra outdid themselves with playing of wild abandon that yet never wanted for sharpness in detail or focus in momentum. Each section shone, but the thunderous combinations of low strings and brass proved especially thrilling.
The score is framed in fragments, each of which must build from the foregoing even as it destroys it. The music seems composed moment to moment, as if every element of the symphony as a form must be interrogated and atomised if it is to be permitted space in the modern consciousness. In that sense the work fundamentally avers from the diachronic essence of the German symphony, yet this aversion is sublimated by a higher order of meaning, an order by which we receive the music as grand and as secure in itself as any work by Brahms or any other central canonical figure. The music makes us realise that the serious work of nonsense can accomplish as much as any cohesive, artificial, artistic statement can.
Photo Credits: Alfred Schnittke
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