Alfred Schnittke - Viola Concerto; Trio Sonata (Yuri Bashmet)

Information

Composer: Alfred Schnittke

• (01-02) Trio Sonata (arr. Bashmet)
• (03-05) Viola Concerto

Yuri Bashmet, viola & conductor
Moscow Soloists (1-2)
London Symphony Orchestra
Mstislav Rostropovich, conductor (3-5)

Date: 1991
Label: RCA

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Review

In praising Nobuko Imai's BIS recording of the Schnittke Viola Concerto I mentioned the extra dimensions revealed by the dedicatee in his Melodiya version with Rozhdestvensky (not generally available in the UK). Here now is Yuri Bashmet's second recording, and it proves the point—even more than Britten—that Schnittke's music depends for its full impact on the personalities of the musicians most closely associated with him.

The Concerto's design consists of two largos surrounding a fast central movement; and the moods alternate between agonized brooding and a kind of Russian psychedelia, inviting the listener to get high on polystylistics and even, I found, calling to mind The Beatles' Across the universe. The most memorable episode comes around 6'30'' into the second movement, where a saccharine gruppetto figure is passed between soloist and orchestra—''with the poignancy of a trashy magazine discovered in bombed-out ruins'', as I wrote in August 1990. Low as it is on subtlety, Schnittke's music is high on passion and pain, and it takes a solo performance of uncompromising panache and fanatical belief to show that there is more to it than collective sado-masochism. Gaze on Bashmet's work, you viola-players, and despair.

The LSO are on fine form for Rostropovich. But even they are upstaged by the Moscow Soloists. Whatever extreme Schnittke's Trio Sonata demands of them, they manage to find expressive shades to make musical sense. Once again the all-consuming need to exorcize emotion carries the listener along. All the same, I would question whether the large-scale structure does the best possible justice to the ideas (several of which seem to me to devolve from the second phrase of The Star-Spangled Banner). The second of the two longish movements seems to bring insufficient contrast, and the appearance of Schnittke's characteristic aerobic-Vivaldi fast music after 8'35'' seems overdue, just as the reminiscences of the first movement would be more effective had we been taken further away from its orbit beforehand. But that's a minor reservation over a magnificently performed and superbly recorded issue.

-- Gramophone

More reviews:
https://www.amazon.com/Schnittke-Viola-Concerto-Trio-Sonata/dp/B00000E6LU

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Alfred Schnittke (November 24, 1934 – August 3, 1998) was a Soviet and German composer. Schnittke completed his graduate work in composition at the Moscow Conservatory in 1961 and taught there from 1962 to 1972 Schnittke's early music shows the strong influence of Dmitri Shostakovich. Later, he created a new style which has been called "polystylism", where he juxtaposed and combined music of various styles past and present. As his health deteriorated, Schnittke's music started to abandon much of the extroversion of his polystylism and retreated into a more withdrawn, bleak style.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Schnittke

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Yuri Bashmet (born 24 January 1953 in Rostov-on-Don) is a Russian conductor, violinist, and violist. Bashmet studied viola at the Moscow Conservatory with Vadim Borisovsky and Fyodor Druzhinin. He was the first violist to perform a solo recital in such halls as New York's Carnegie Hall, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Barbican in London, the Berlin Philharmonic, La Scala of Milan. Numerous modern composers have composed works especially for Yuri Bashmet or dedicated to him, including 50 viola concertos and other works. Bashmet plays a 1758 viola made by Milanese luthier Paolo Testore, which he purchased in 1972.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bashmet

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