Alfred Schnittke - Requiem; Piano Concerto (Valery Polyansky)

Information

Composer: Alfred Schnittke

• Concerto for Piano and Strings
• Requiem from the music to Schiller's drama Don Carlos

Igor Khudolei, piano

Russian State Symphonic Cappella

Russian State Symphony Orchestra

Valery Polyansky, conductor

Date: 1997

Label: Chandos

https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%209564

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Review

Tempering passion and exuberance with above-average control, Schnittke’s Concerto for piano and strings of 1979 has worn better than most of his orchestral works and is now deservedly in the repertoire of many soloists (the listed comparisons are those most valuably coupled – the BIS disc with the otherwise unobtainable Concerto for oboe and harp, the RCA with some classic performances, such as Yuri Bashmet’s of the Viola Concerto).

Of the Requiem I am less sure. The fact of its composition at a time when religious music was still blacklisted in the Soviet Union is undoubtedly a point of interest (the work was ‘smuggled in’ as incidental music to Schiller’s Don Carlos), and its depth of feeling is never in doubt. But the musical material seems less intrinsically interesting, so that the stylistic tricks to which it is subjected rather lose their point. The new recording is certainly recommendable to newcomers, and avid Schnittke collectors may like to know that the work is noticeably more broadly paced by Polyansky than by Parkman, and more expressively sung, albeit with heavy Russian accents from the soloists. Also the instrumentation has been retouched (very effectively so in the electric guitar parts of the “Tuba mirum”).

The Piano Concerto is as finely played as on any rival version. Apart from a severely mistuned and very prominent repeated note near the beginning, Chandos’s recording quality maintains their high reputation (and there’s a perverse streak in Schnittke’s character which might even enjoy that mistuning). The new issue comes with a helpful essay from Alexander Ivashkin; the Requiem on BIS includes the composer’s own booklet-note.

-- Gramophone

More reviews:
https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/orchestral/schnittke-8/

https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Ludmila-Kuznetsova/dp/B000000B1R

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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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Valery Polyansky (born 19 April, 1949 in Moscow) is a Russian orchestral and choral conductor. Polyansky studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers included Boris Kulikov and Odisei Dimtriadi. Since 1992 he has been a chief  conductor and artistic director of the State Symphony Capella of Russia which consists of a symphonic orchestra and a choir, numbering more than 200 artists. Polyansky is recognized today as a leading interpreter of the works of Sergei Rachmaninov and a number of other neglected Russian composers such as Alfred Schnittke, Sergei Taneyev and Nikolai Miaskovsky.

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/valery-polyansky-mn0000497046/biography

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