August 19, 2015

  • A Russian Ives? Historic Release of Schittke's First Symphony

     

    Schnittke: Symphony No. 1
      USSR Ministry of Culture State Symphony Orchestra/Gennady Rozhdestvensky
    Melodiya 10 02321
    Total Time:  64:57
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Although much of Western Europe and America seemed to see the symphonic form dissolve into 20-30 minute essays, composers in the Soviet Union continued to explore the symphony in its large-scale style inherited through Mahler and continued in some of the grand works by Shostakovich.  Such is the case with Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1 which was begun in 1969 and completed in 1974.  The piece is a practical kitchen sink of postmodernism complete with deconstruction and reconstruction, quotations, consonance and dissonance, as well as a blend of different styles.  The latter comes through in the jazz improvisational solos peppered through the work.  There is also a visual element to the piece which of course goes missing in a straight up recording.

    The opening movement is set in classic sonata form.  The bells that open the work seem to immediately announce the heralding of a new era.  A variety sounds beginning to emerge from the resounding chaos that also includes applause and a host of other unusual effects and semi-improvisational ideas.  The music has this intense Penderecki and Ligeti blend with dissonances and unusual fragments and sound styles thrust at the audience.  It is as if Ives has returned!  The music continues this wafting back and forth between intense post-tonal music to sudden bursts of harmony as extreme edges of instruments are explored.  Solo ideas also seem to careen into the angular styles.  It seems to move in one direction only to scatter somewhere else as we see the form almost collapse in upon itself until we end up with massive moment of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the beginning perhaps of the collapse of ideas of theme and form.  It serves as a clue to what the work has been unraveling.  This is music that can be experienced quite dramatically and viscerally at first with repeated listening needed to explore the other thematic and harmonic components that make up this movement, and indeed the work as a whole.

    The second moves into a scherzo with a sense of more genre styles explored.  Practically every dance one can imagine in a symphony appears in the whirlwind that is stymied by an odd solo for violin and piano.  It begins with a very Baroque dance but then quotes from the repertoire begin to intervene, like a variety of radio bleedthroughs into the music or some macabre nightmare unfolding.  The circus atmosphere also pervades here.  The third movement is an intense “Largo” that tears apart the emotional core of the form.  Then we are off to a finale that includes serial technique and further quotations from the repertoire.  Here the musical quotes feel like they are overpowered by the intensity and dissonance that blurs the romanticism for an earlier era.

    On one hand, such a description that has been outlined above might describe an utter mess, but instead one finds a powerful philosophical and intellectual affront to the musical milieu of Soviet Russia and modern music.  Some have even seen in it a “chronicle” of the 20th Century.  The music moves from one movement into another, not really paying attention to even these signposts.  Gennady Rozhdestvensky was the first conductor to bring this work to light and he is on the podium here for this recording made in 1987.  American audiences most likely will see in this symphony a kindred spirit to the massive symphonies of Charles Ives whose music tended to flaunt the romanticism of a previous bygone era as it also confusedly tried to pull together the music of Ives’ own times.  Schnittke does essentially the same thing in this first symphony with an eye to a much broader, grander symphonic tradition coupled with the frenetic musical styles that had been a part of the European avant-garde of the 1960s.  It is quite fascinating music requiring dedicated musicians to make it work as much as theater as music really.  The orchestra here manages to wade through this music well and the recording captures the sound quite well.  The real issue is does the work, or will the work stand the test of time, or be a curiosity.  As a herald to a new compositional voice, it did indeed create enough of an impression to firmly cement Schnittke as a significant musical voice for the latter 20th Century.  As each performance will certainly be unique, those who are fans of the work will be able to compare to the few earlier recordings that do exist.  This Melodiya one is essentially one important document of the work in what was then the post-Soviet era.