Schnittke 9

Since I only live, what, like 3 hours from Lincoln Center now, I popped down into the City last night to hear the Juilliard Orchestra give the US premiere of Alfred Schnittke's unfinished Ninth Symphony, completed by a composer named Alexander Raskatov. Raskatov's own "Nunc Dimmitis" followed; Dennis Russell Davies conducted.

There's a short but descriptive preview article in yesterday's NY Times. Listen to the audio clip there, too, which is the first 5 minutes of the first movement.

Schnittke died in '98 after the last of a series of debilitating strokes, having shortly beforehand had scrawled out a nearly illegible reduced score with his non-paralyzed left arm.

I'd noticed this concert was coming a while back and decided to try to make it, figuring that even if Schnittke 9 wasn't a valedictory masterpiece it'd be my only chance for a while to hear a late Schnittke symphony, or really any Schnittke symphony. Not in the classical top 90, these.

Schnittke's Ninth is not a valedictory masterpiece, but it's a compelling work. There are three oddly matched movements, two Moderatos -- very similar in tone, though the first is longer and ranges more widely -- followed by a Presto, amped up but made from the same general mold. It seems that Schnittke left this as a completed work, though the program note observes that Raskatov feels like Schnittke intended a fourth movement. All three movements end abruptly, creating a strongly fragmentary feeling at the end.

The first movement is the strongest: the cellos and basses start by scaling a tonally ambiguous rock face of a theme, and from there follows a wandering elegy of a movement, like an eroded ruin of a Shostakovich symphony. The dramatic geography is still there, but without a symphonic ediface constructed above it; recognizable themes are barely present, counterpoint is often reduced to a tumbled overlay of unreconciled parts, and the emotional climaxes sound feverish and inchoate. I doubt this interpretation is what Schnittke was going for, but it works -- concentrating a very potent emotional energy and subsuming it into an elemental, dehumanized landscape. Moments of lucidity and consonance are few, hard-won, and fiercely ardent.

The second movement retreads much of the same ground, with some commentary from the harpsichord (a Schnittkean calling-card); the third movement kindles the same sort of material into a violent fire before a slower, chorale-like coda of sorts puts it to bed.

There's a lack of variety in the instrumental texture that starts to weigh in the second half of the piece, and the constant wandering loses immediacy too. It's very hard to tell, of course, how much this has to do with incompleteness, or with Raskatov's work. The Juilliard Orchestra is extremely good, but I'd be curious to hear whether a professional orchestra's strings would sound more pointed or purposeful. There are recordings of all of Schnittke's prior symphonies, but it's hard to make a comparison without really giving something on CD a very close listen, which I haven't.

The Ninth itself is going to be recorded with Davies and the Dresden Philharmonic next year, so it will at least persist in that form.

Raskatov's "Nunc Dimittis" (for orchestra plus vocalists, a mezzo-soprano and the four-man Hilliard Ensemble) was appealingly translucent after the Schnittke, even if dry and acerbic. Raskatov seems to combine the static moods of eastern European "holy minimalists" with the sparse gestures of expressive modernism: usually the vocalists would measure out repetitive lines with the orchestra (very seldom the full orchestra) employed as a stripped-down and slowly shifting backdrop. A brittle concertante group of piano, celesta, harp, harpsichord, and electric guitar & bass offered effective punctuation here and there, as well as calling Schnittke to mind again. Savage cluster-chords would periodically crescendo out of the low brass or strings to a rattling volume and then disappear. It was a bit hard to judge this piece, just since the acoustic blend of the voices wasn't very good from the second tier of Avery Fisher Hall.

Before all this, Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante, op. 84 (violin, cello, oboe, bassoon soloists) amiably filled up the first half of the program. The first movement was satisfying, intelligent and colored with some surprising harmonies; but the slow movement is fairly drab, and the last movement frequently gets bogged down in uninteresting violin filigree, which the violinist wasn't selling hard enough either, I don't think.

The program note included a neat short cultural history of the sinfonia concertante as a classical form, so I'll include that here as well. I'd only add that, if the words "Sinfonia Concertante" don't make you think of Mozart's K. 364 for violin, viola, and orchestra, you need to find a recording of that. That is rightfully in the classical top 90.

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(excerpted from program note by David Wright)

As a genre, the sinfonia concertante is a creature of the Classical era, when public concerts first became common. The new bourgeoise concertgoers revelled in these concerto-like works for multiple solists, which emphasized the showy, the cheerful, and the exotic. Over 99 percent of them were in major keys, and the solo groups might include such far-out combinations as harpsichord-violin-piano, piano-mandolin-trumpet-bass, or harp-cello-basset horn. After the fall of Napoleon, Romanticism and the cult of the individual changed audience tastes; traveling virtuosi such as Paganini and Liszt roamed the continent, and the sinfonia concertante, a relatively modest piece tailored for local talent, disappeared as quietly as it had sprung up.