Alfred Schnittke
Psalms of Repentance

LA RECENSIONE

As if wandering in a forbidden city. As if finding oneself in an "infernopurgatoryparadise" where everything transcends. A true musical hyperuranium. Alfred Schnittke was a great figure of the twentieth century, a man embodying all the contradictions, dilemmas, and dramas of the century just passed. With his eclecticism, with his having a thousand styles and yet ultimately none. But this work is a musical cathedral, a parallel dimension, a temple. I really wouldn't know how to define it. "Contemporary" music, certainly. But perhaps "timeless" is the better term.

And it is the a cappella choir that adds even more dimension of sacredness to these twelve extraordinary musical moments. And what a choral company. The Swedish Radio Choir, superbly guided by Tonu Kaljuste, intones these orthodox psalms (the text is from the sixteenth century) with a rigor and a "human" virtuosity, even before being vocal, that leaves one astonished. And here there is no musical instrument, except for the man's own strings. And that opening with the basses humming is really hard to distinguish from cellos and double basses. Are they strings or are they voices? They are voices. Strings of the soul.

The musical material is dense and incredibly rich. An inner magma of immense spirituality, which now explodes in a "fortissimo", which now isolates itself in the tenor's voice emerging solitary from the choir, which now freezes to raise, trembling, its supplication for salvation to an eternal and universal God. The structure is granite, tonal, but those dissonances that stand out suddenly, those underground musical lines, those counterpoints... a spirituality in continuous boiling, certainly suffered, but incredibly sublime, transcendental and "lived".

The last choir is entirely "humming". The disk flows as it opened, closing a musical circle with the dimensions of universality. A truly vibrant alpha and omega of the intricate spirituality of contemporary man.