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Hottest Serious Soviet Composer: Alfred Schnittke
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16376 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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5 / 1989 |
1,935 Words |
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Andrew Clark
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Ask any Soviet classical musician to name the most important Soviet composer alive today and the answer will most likely be Alfred Schnittke. Along with several other Soviet composers of his generation, including Edison Denisov and Sofia Gubaidulina, Schnittke is beginning to attract considerable attention and admiration in the West--and not only among new music specialists. Schnittke is quite simply the most original musical force to emerge from the Soviet Union since Shostakovich. It is a reputation amply sustained by his new symphony, his fifth, which has just received its first performances in Amsterdam, Moscow, and the Swedish city of Gothenburg.
Schnittke was born in 1934 in Engels, southeast of Moscow on the River Volga. His lineage is half-Jewish, half-German. He began his musical studies in 1946 in Vienna, where his father was working as a correspondent for a German-language Soviet newspaper. After taking his diploma as a choirmaster in Moscow, Schnittke studied for eight years at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1962 he became a professor there, teaching instrumentation, counterpoint, and compositon until 1972. He has also worked in the Experimental Studio of Electronic Music in Moscow.
Schnittke's music first began to cause ripples of excitement in the West about ten years ago, and the demand for performances has grown rapidly since then. His music is now known for its breadth of scale, clarity of design, and ability to cross barriers between different musical languages and styles. He draws on the widest variety of sonic stimuli available to the modern composer, including jazz and twelve-tone serial principles. Like Charles Ives, he is not afraid to quote the work of other composers, weaving the quotes into a musical fabric that is undeniably his own.
Among his more bizarre musical creations is the First Symphony, completed in 1972 but not heard in Moscow until 1985. It is an exotic, exuberant construction lasting more than eighty minutes, with musicians and conductor walking on and off stage during the performance. Parts of the symphony resemble a mass improvisation, very theatrical and visual in its appeal. That helps to explain why Shnittke's works strike a more popular chord than the music of many other contemporary composers--and why his almost filmic crosscutting techniques and penchant for opposing idioms have made him a figure of controversy within the Soviet musical establishment. Schnittkke has been criticized--but he has survived.
Of all the countries where Schnittke's chamber and symphonic music is now regularly performed, few can match Sweden in volume. Within three weeks of the recent world premier of his Fifth Symphony in Amsterdam, the work was played and subsequently recorded by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under its chief conductor, Neeme Jarvi. No fewer than eleven works by Schnittke have been featured in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra's 1988-89 concert season, easily outstripping all other composers, including Beethoven and Mozart--a formula that would be considered box-office suicide by most concert promoters in Western Europe and the United States.
The same astonishing proportion of Schnittke performances is being achieved by the symphony orchestra in Malmo, along the Swedish coast from Gothenburg, while the Stockholm Philharmonic will stage a two-week Schnittke festival in October of this year. These three orchestras are to be joined by two other Swedish ensembles in a
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