Alfred Schnittke
Chamber Music

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"

And perhaps this famous phrase by Adorno is enough to explain what profound difference, what perhaps unbridgeable chasm, irreparably divides the world of "classical" music from the world of "contemporary" music. Because if classical and baroque music originated from beauty, the world of contemporary music must necessarily originate from truth. Not art for art's sake. But art for life. And Alfred Schnittke, "the last great of the twentieth century," certainly moved his entire monumental body of musical work from his own life, from the anxieties of a century decimated by war and the carnage imposed on man by man. A "Guernica" of lovelessness starting from the concentration camps and the gulags, whose regurgitations of death and indifference still resonate in the war fires that burn futilely in this twilight of the third millennium. And anxiety is truly the common thread of this splendid collection of chamber works by Schnittke. Works for piano and strings that reveal, like an epiphany, the multifaceted and universal genius of the great Russian master. Works that exude the inner discomforts and unmet and unsatisfied needs of twentieth-century man. But that do not surrender to a pre-written destiny. On the contrary, they stubbornly and doggedly seek meaning. They reach a tonal harbor after a sea of atonality. They sometimes even resolve into references to baroque, and to the more "canonical" roots of European classical music.

The album opens with the splendid "Fuga for Solo Violin," a virtuosic work that represents much more than a simple homage to Bach's spirituality. Building a polyphonic musical genre like the fugue on an instrument like the violin necessarily requires a path fraught with difficulty, especially for the soloist. And it is here that perhaps lies the deepest message of Schnittke's poetics. It is no longer enough to pray, as Bach did with his music. One must personally struggle to prevent the world we live in from becoming hellish. A harsh musical motif, that of the Fuga, reminiscent of typically Russian sounds that reverberate on the strings of a violin stretched to the utmost in its virtuosic yearning. A musical solipsism that resolves into the dark and gloomy dialogue of "Stille Musik" for violin and cello. A work that creates atonal sound masses that grow progressively like in a gloomy and motionless tide, upon which only silence finally manages to float. But the masterpiece of the album is certainly represented by the famous "Piano Quintet," which in this performance features Irina Schnittke, the great master's wife, on the piano. A work, the Quintet, that stands as a colossus on the contemporary chamber music landscape to project its message full of anguish and hope.

And if on one hand, the second movement, "In Tempo Di Valse," is a sick and rancid waltz, it is truly in the last movement, "Moderato Pastorale," that Schnittke's art assumes a truly universal value. The theme that animates the "Moderato Pastorale" is an incredibly sweet and lulling motif, full of bucolic calm, perfectly tonal, which the piano repeats fourteen times, always the same, from the beginning to the end of the piece. All this heedless of the dissonances, harsh and nasty, which the strings oppose for almost the entire duration of the piece. And it is only in the last bars that the strings finally quiet down and blossom into a tonal forest that whispers of a rediscovered meaning, then slowly fades and laps gently on the shores of silence. Leaving only the piano to repeat, for the fourteenth and final time, its delicate, unwavering plea for love.