Alfred Schnittke - Peer Gynt (Eri Klas)

Information

Composer: Alfred Schnittke

• Peer Gynt, ballet

Royal Swedish Orchestra

Eri Klas, conductor

Date: 1994

Label: BIS
https://bis.se/composer/schnittke-alfred/schnittke-peer-gynt

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Review

Ibsen’s satirical fantasy Peer Gynt has attracted few composers since Grieg. But in our own time, Robin Holloway has made it the subject of an ambitious choral-orchestral ballad, and Alfred Schnittke a full-length ballet, now faithfully recorded by Eri Klas and the orchestra of the Royal Opera, Stockholm.

Written for Hamburg Ballet’s John Neumeier, it’s among Schnittke’s most impressive recent works, the more so for being written in the shadow of illness, which has failed to inhibit an astonishing breadth of invention. A striking comparison is with Maxwell Davies’s Caroline Mathilde. Both scores lighten their sombre expressionism with softer details, but in Peer Gynt these have the characteristic touch of Schnittke’s polystylism, with pub piano music for the scene of Peer’s audition, and tender Grieg-pastiche for the Act 2 Overture. A network of motifs gives the ballet an audible symphonic unity, and Schnittke’s personal scoring of tangled clusters, bells and jagged counterpoints of unison strings and trombones further beguiles the ear. Going beyond Ibsen, the haunting Epilogue reconciles Peer and Solveig, with taped a cappella voices set against darker memories of the trolls.

-- Nicholas Williams, BBC Music Magazine

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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Schnittke's music started to abandon much of the extroversion of his polystylism and retreated into a more withdrawn, bleak style.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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Eri Klas (7 June 1939 – 26 February 2016) was an Estonian conductor. He premiered Alfred Schnittke's 1st Cello Concerto (Munich Philharmonic, 1986) and Peer Gynt ballet (Hamburg State Opera, 1989).

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

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