Alfred Schnittke
Complete piano music
Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) Complete piano music Simon Smith
Disc One
Piano Sonata No 1
1 Lento – [8:33]
2 Allegretto – [4:58]
3 Lento – [8:06]
4 Allegro [8:44]
Piano Sonata No 2
5 Moderato [6:26]
6 Lento [5:29]
7 Allegro moderato [6:56]
Piano Sonata No 3
8 Lento [5:44]
9 Allegro [2:03]
10 Lento [5:14]
11 Allegro [3:17]
12 Variations [11:11]
Total playing time (disc 1) [76:49]
Recorded on 23 January and 4-5 December
2012 and on 18-19 April 2013 in the Reid
Concert Hall, University of Edinburgh
Producer: Paul Baxter & Simon Smith
Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Paul Baxter & Simon Smith
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Piano: Steinway model D, 1995, serial no. 527910; Steinway model D, 2012, serial no. 592403
Piano technician: Norman Motion Session photography © Delphian Records
Cover image: Pierre Soulages (b. 1919), Painting 136 x 136 cm, 24 December 1990
Disc Two
1 Prelude and Fugue [8:15]
2 Improvisation and Fugue [5:53]
3 Variations on a Chord [6:56] Little Piano Pieces
4 Folk song [0:29]
5 In the mountains [0:35]
6 Cuckoo and woodpecker [0:34]
7 Melody [1:23]
8 Tale [1:51]
9 Play [0:38]
10 Children’s piece [3:13]
11 March [1:19]
12 Homage to Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich [6:49] with Richard Beauchamp and John Cameron
Five Aphorisms
13 1. Moderato assai [4:09]
14 2. Allegretto [1:53]
15 3. Lento [1:57]
16 4. Senza tempo [2:36]
17 5. Grave [2:34]
18 Sonatina for piano (four hands) [3:02] with Richard Beauchamp
19 Cadenza to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor, K491, first movement (1975) [4:56]
Two Cadenzas to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 21 in C major, K467 (1980)
20 … to first movement [4:03]
21 … to third movement [1:09]
22 Cadenza to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 25 in C major, K503, first movement (1983) [2:43]
Two Cadenzas to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 2 in B flat major, K39 (1990)
23 … to first movement [1:34]
24 … to third movement [0:58]
Total playing time (disc 2) [69:40]
(oil on canvas) / Private collection / Photo ©
Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: John Fallas
With thanks to the University of Edinburgh, James McNeill, Moira Landels and HansUlrich Duffek
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Notes on the music
I remember vividly the first time I heard a piece of music by Schnittke. Having been asked to play the harpsichord part in a performance of the Cello Concerto No 1, rather boldly programmed by a youth orchestra, I obtained a score and recording and sat down to listen. Shortly after a quiet, beautiful though uneasy opening, there was a colossal explosion from the whole orchestra, including an enormous two-arm cluster over most of the piano keyboard. Until that moment I had never conceived of the piano being used in this way, nor had I encountered a piece of music with this kind of overwhelming expressive force. It is not an exaggeration to say that that moment changed my life and certainly turned on its head the way that I thought about music and its possibilities. Thereafter I avidly devoured as much of Schnittke’s music as I could get my hands on, and this recording is one of the results.
Schnittke’s later life and music were profoundly affected by two things. Firstly, in 1980 he made the decision to be baptised a Catholic. His father was nominally Jewish, his mother nominally Catholic, but both were committed to non-religious Communist ideals. Alfred, however, had always felt drawn to Christianity. A number of overtly religious works followed, in which Schnittke engages directly with the traditions of Russian Orthodox church music as well as plainchant.
These works include Symphony No 4 (1984), the Concerto for Mixed Chorus (1984–85) and Penitential Psalms (1987). As early as 1975 he had composed a Requiem, and his Symphony No 2 (1979), subtitled both ‘St Florian’ and ‘Invisible Mass’, is in six movements structured after the Catholic Mass.
Secondly, the composer was afflicted by a series of strokes, after the first of which, in 1985, he was pronounced clinically dead three times. He made a remarkable recovery, but the effect on his music was enormous: his subsequent works are far more expressionistic, the extremes still more extreme. Some of the larger works from around this time, particularly the concertos, follow a truly exhausting emotional trajectory, though not always bleak in outcome. After a second stroke in 1991 Schnittke’s music became much more sparse and rarefied, somehow muted and withdrawn in character. This is at least in part for the simple practical reason that the physical act of writing became much more difficult. A third and fourth stroke, just days apart, followed in 1994, and a fifth in 1998 proved fatal. In these last years composition was almost impossible, though Schnittke was able to complete some short works, and a ninth symphony, written laboriously and almost illegibly with his left hand, was finally reconstructed by the composer Alexander Raskatov and first performed in 2007.
Schnittke was born in Engels (formerly Pokrovsk), capital of the area defined between 1918 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 as the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The outbreak of war thwarted Schnittke’s early attempts to begin his musical education in Moscow; instead it began in Soviet-occupied Vienna in 1946, where his father, a journalist and translator who had joined the army as an interpreter, had been posted. Although in 1948 the family did finally move to Moscow (where from 1953 to 1961 Alfred studied at the Moscow Conservatory, subsequently teaching there until 1972), it was in Vienna that Schnittke fell in love with the Austro-German musical tradition. Even when at his most radical, or indulging in riotous pastiche, an engagement with this tradition underpins all of his output; throughout, too, he remains notably committed to classical forms – sonatas, symphonies, trios, quartets, variations.
As a student Schnittke had been a competent pianist, certainly skilled enough to play his own pieces and even to perform concertos by Rachmaninov and Schumann, and his second wife Irina, whom he married in 1961, was a concert pianist. His piano writing is both unconventional and distinctive. A particular hallmark is his extensive use of clusters – playing all the keys within a given span –ranging from small ones of three or four notes to enormous ones played with both forearms.
This leads to a particularly physical relationship with the instrument, where the pianist plays not just with the fingers but with all parts of the hands and arms. Another favourite compositional technique, seen over and over again in the orchestral music, is a close canon, with the entries a single beat apart or less, a narrow interval, and usually in a large number of parts. When transferred to the piano this can lead to considerable technical difficulties, since what may be easy with ten violins is rather less so with ten fingers.
Schnittke’s largest works for the piano are the three sonatas, which all date from the later part of his output. Piano Sonata No 1 (1987) is a substantial work by any standard – structured in four movements played without a break, and lasting upward of half an hour. The emotional journey of the piece is in many ways typical of the composer’s work in the years following his first stroke: a slow and intense opening movement; a second movement which begins innocuously enough but increases exponentially in tension; a third, slow, introverted and focused; and a finale of extraordinary power which ultimately implodes under the weight of its own intensity, ending with a desolate coda.
Schnittke composed this sonata for the Russian pianist Vladimir Feltsman, who gave the premiere in New York in 1988. As in other largescale pieces, such as the Violin Concerto No 4 and Viola Concerto, Schnittke used a musical
monogram derived from the dedicatee’s name as a kind of cyclical motto-theme, here A–D–F–(g–a)–E flat representing vlADimir FeltSman (E flat being ‘Es’ in German, hence S). In this piece he also uses a monogram derived from his own name, A–D–E flat–C–B–F–E or AlfreD SCHnittke (B natural in German is ‘H’). The F–E at the end is either two middle letters of Alfred, moved out of place, or the beginning of Feltsman; in either case, the fact that both monograms begin with A–D both defines the work’s two main tonal centres and helps the composer to make the most of the ambiguity between the two themes. (The fact that the Schnittke monogram contains Shostakovich’s motto ‘DSCH’ can be considered a further happy coincidence.)
The sonata begins with the Feltsman theme, which is extended into a long, plaintive monody, then the Schnittke monogram is heard three times over a slowly tolling A in the bass. A third cyclical theme follows, a slow and solemn chorale evoking the world of old Russian church music, but also juxtaposing completely unrelated triads in a manner akin to that of the bold, ultraexpressive music of Carlo Gesualdo, who was the subject of Schnittke’s third opera Gesualdo (1993). These themes recur throughout the sonata: the chorale is heard again in full, twice, at the end of the third movement, and then for a final time at the climax of the fourth; the Schnittke monogram appears at the climax of the second movement, in a close four-part canon and in a different permutation (SCHFEAD), and
again in the middle of the third; the Feltsman monogram, and the whole of the passage into which it develops at its first appearance, is heard again in canon in the first section of the finale, and then again at the very end of the piece, where it is combined with the original version of the Schnittke motif underneath.
Piano Sonata No 2 (1990–91), written for Schnittke’s wife Irina, follows a more traditional three-movement pattern. The opening is rather sensuous and overtly ‘Romantic’, wistful and bittersweet, its delicate counterpoint recalling Berg’s Op. 1 Sonata; but with each paragraph the tension rises ever higher until the inevitable collapse. The second movement, more austere than the First Sonata’s slow movement, begins with some curiously Wagnerian harmonic touches – the Wagner of Tristan or Parsifal Act II – and then a chorale motif reminiscent of those in some late works of Shostakovich (the Fifteenth Symphony, for instance). Its rhythm, with the stress on the second beat, evokes a sarabande. The vigorous finale begins with transformed versions of the delicate themes of the first movement, now jammed together in grinding close canons. As ever, the level of intensity is always rising – faster, really, than the musical structure, player or instrument can support – and so this founders in short order, yielding to an extended reprise of the second movement’s chorale. But this, too, builds to a climax of shocking brutality. The piece ends with a disquieting echo of the chorale.
Piano Sonata No 3 (1992), first performed by Boris Berman in 1996, is an example of what we might call Schnittke’s ‘late style’, pared down and without the extravagance of some of the works of the 1980s though of similar intensity. It was his last work for solo piano. Again we see the composer’s preferred slowfast-slow-fast movement pattern. The two slow movements here are both particularly withdrawn, proceeding almost entirely in a bare two-part texture and never rising above mp. The second movement is a sort of gaunter cousin of the equivalent movement in the first sonata (the term ‘scherzo’ seems in both cases inappropriate). The finale is most enigmatic of all: again much of it is in a two-part texture, and while there is some hint of the toccata quality of the second sonata’s finale, it lacks the energy to drive it to the sort of cathartic climax we hear there. Instead, in the final bar we have a simple filled-in tritone – the most ambiguous interval, with pitch definition in any case attenuated by the cluster – neither loud nor soft. The whole piece feels like a question, and it simply stops rather than concludes.
The shorter works included here, which along with the sonatas comprise Schnittke’s entire published output for solo piano (including one piece for piano duet and another for six hands at one instrument), are mostly earlier than the sonatas, and are presented here in chronological order (with the cadenzas for four of Mozart’s piano concertos as a sort of
appendix). The Variations (1954–55) were composed while Schnittke was a student at the Moscow Conservatory. During these years he also produced a piano sonata, now lost, and a set of six piano preludes which remains unpublished, as well as a violin sonata which has now been published as ‘No 0’. These offer a fascinating glimpse of the young composer finding his own voice; the Variations demonstrate great familiarity with the Romantic piano repertoire, idiomatic piano writing and skill in variation form. The rich, chromatic harmony is reminiscent of Rachmaninov or Scriabin. The theme itself is a beautiful diatonic melody, either a folk tune or an excellent imitation, set against a chromatically descending bass, and is followed by eight variations and a coda which reprises the theme.
In the late 1950s it finally became possible for musicians in the Soviet Union to access scores by the Second Viennese School composers – Schoenberg, Berg and Webern – and by the now long-exiled Stravinsky, as well as by Stockhausen, Ligeti and other leading figures of the post-war avant garde. The impact on Soviet composers was immense. Schnittke was also deeply influenced by meeting Luigi Nono, who visited Moscow in 1963 and, while not entirely complimentary about some of Schnittke’s pieces, did impress upon the young composer the importance of acquainting himself as much as possible with the musical innovations that had been going on in Europe.
Like many of his peers, Schnittke eagerly experimented with serial technique, a risky business at the best of times in the Soviet Union where, under the doctrines of Socialist realism, such methods were severely frowned upon as ‘formalist’ and ‘bourgeois’. The Prelude and Fugue (1963) and Improvisation and Fugue (1965) are both serial works, the Prelude of the former being in an ABA form built on two twelve-note rows. In the A section, the first row is presented in a gloomy three-part texture at the bottom of the keyboard. The B section deploys the second row more boldly in a chordal texture which culminates in a twelve-note chord, and the second A section is a retrograde inversion of the first, now in a high register. Both A sections end with a Morse-code-like figure taken from Schnittke’s early opera The Eleventh Commandment (1962), which was completed in piano score but rejected for performance by the authorities on account of its experimental musical language. The Fugue has a long subject which cycles through the pitches of the first row four times. The second row is used in a contrasting middle section, first played slowly in the bass while its inversion is heard in regular staccato quavers above. At the climax of the piece this second theme thunders out in six-part chords with fragments of the main subject inserted above it in the gaps.
The Improvisation and Fugue was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture for
the 1966 International Tchaikovsky Competition, though in the event none of the competitors chose to play it and it had to wait until 1975 for its first public performance (given, incidentally, by Vladimir Krainev, who had won the competition the next time it was held in 1970).
It is based on a single row, presented starkly at the beginning in a series of accumulating chords: the first pitch of the row alone, then the first two, then three, until all twelve notes are sounded at once. The remainder of the Improvisation freely explores the row in linear fragments and by dividing it up into three-note chords. A low cluster introduces the Fugue, which is rather free in construction and has the character of a rumba and strong jazz inflections. Again the piece culminates in a brash presentation of the row, this time in octave clusters before dissolving into fragments.
After a few years of experimentation Schnittke grew tired of the determinism of serial composition, but continued to apply some aspects of the technique freely in his music for the rest of his life. The Variations on a Chord (1965) are one example of his post-serial thinking. Here the ‘theme’ is a single chord containing one of each of the twelve chromatic pitches. Throughout the whole piece each pitch is only used in its original octave, a technique that Schnittke doubtless encountered in the second movement of Webern’s Variations for piano, Op. 27. Given the total harmonic stasis that results, the compositional challenge is
to create variety through all other available parameters: texture, dynamics, rhythm and so on. There are seven short variations in total.
The Little Piano Pieces (1971) were written for Schnittke’s son Andrey, who gave the first performance of six of them in Moscow that December, aged 6. These pieces amply demonstrate that Schnittke was quite able to write short and ‘simple’ pieces for young performers, but some of them, the ‘Children’s piece’ in particular, offer a taste of the unsettling tensions found in his larger works. The Sonatina for piano duet (1994) was among the composer’s unpublished works at the time of his death; it is dedicated ‘to my granddaughter Irina and her grandmother Irina’ – that is, Andrey’s daughter and Schnittke’s wife. Though at first it might seem an easygoing pastiche of a work by Mozart or Schubert, it does take some detours into slightly out-of-the-way territory as it proceeds.
The curious Homage to Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich (1979) is a rare example of a work for three players at one piano. (The young Rachmaninov wrote both a ‘Waltz’ and a ‘Romance’ for six hands, the latter subsequently reappearing in the accompaniment to the second movement of his Piano Concerto No 2.) This work of Schnittke is something of an occasional piece, where the three composers of the title are quoted in a sort of Ivesian collage. Shostakovich is most easily
recognised by the ‘Polka’ from his ballet The Golden Age; a slightly more oblique reference is made to the first movement of his String Quartet No 7. Stravinsky is represented by the pentatonic ‘Chinese March’ from Le Rossignol, and by an allusion to the stamping repeated chords and motor rhythms of The Rite of Spring. Prokofiev is invoked by way of the Humoresque Scherzo – the ninth of the Ten Pieces for Piano Op. 12, which the composer also published as a separate piece for four bassoons – which appears around four minutes into the piece and returns to usher in the riotous climax where all three senior composers crash together.
The Five Aphorisms (1990) are dedicated to the Ukrainian pianist Alexander Slobodyanik and the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, both of whom were at this time resident in the USA, and who gave the first performance together at Carnegie Hall in New York, Brodsky reading his own poems between the movements. In these pieces many of the techniques and textures of the sonatas are evident, but within much more compressed and ambiguous structures. The fourth piece, with no tempo specified and with imprecisely notated rhythmic durations, is particularly enigmatic.
In 1975–77 Schnittke composed an ambitious cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto which counts among his most blatantly polystylistic creations, quoting first Beethoven’s own Symphony No 7, and then a selection of the
great violin concertos written after Beethoven’s – Brahms, Berg, Bartók, Shostakovich. When Gidon Kremer made a recording of the Beethoven with Schnittke’s cadenza it caused not a little controversy among some purists. However, between 1975 and 1990 Schnittke also composed six cadenzas for four of Mozart’s piano concertos (and, in 1983, cadenzas to the same composer’s Bassoon Concerto) which are, if not entirely ‘in style’, considerably less radical. The cadenza to the C minor concerto (K491) is the longest, and makes a powerful contribution to an already weighty work. The cadenza to the first movement of the K467 concerto is not far behind, and here, as in his cadenza for K503, Schnittke makes much of the conflict between tonic major and minor. In the latter it is evident that he also enjoys the oftnoted resemblance of one of Mozart’s themes both to the rhythm of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No 5, and (although it was not in fact written until six years later) to the Marseillaise
© 2013 Simon Smith
These discs are dedicated in gratitude and admiration to my teacher Richard Beauchamp on the occasion of his retirement from St Mary’s Music School, Edinburgh.
Simon Smith was born in Northumberland in 1983. At St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh he studied piano with Richard Beauchamp and composition with Tom David Wilson. At Cambridge University he studied composition with Jeremy Thurlow and Giles Swayne.
As a pianist he has performed many of the landmarks of the twentieth-century piano repertoire, most notably many of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke and the Piano Concerto and complete Etudes of György Ligeti, following a performance of which latter he was acclaimed as ‘a phenomenon –nothing daunts him, technically or musically’ (The Scotsman). For Delphian Records he has recorded solo music by James MacMillan and Stuart MacRae (twinned on Delphian DCD34009), Hafliði Hallgrímsson (DCD34051) and Thomas Wilson (DCD34079, in which he also joins members of the Edinburgh Quartet for Wilson’s Piano Trio).
In addition to his performances and recordings he has continued to compose, mostly for orchestra, and also works professionally as a music engraver, having produced scores of numerous large-scale works by Harrison Birtwistle, James MacMillan, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others.
Also available on Delphian
MacMillan/MacRae: Piano Works
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DCD34009
Simon Smith’s recording debut: a programme of works by two leading Scottish composers. The disc includes the complete piano oeuvre to date of James MacMillan, and also features the world premiere recording of Stuart MacRae’s Piano Sonata. In a rendering the composer has called ‘extraordinary’, this performance spills forth in a fiery display of technical virtuosity that is not easily forgotten.
‘an outstanding player with a huge expressive range … Both composers are fortunate indeed to have such an advocate’
– International Record Review, May 2003
Hafliði Hallgrímsson: Music for solo piano
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‘Smith proves an admirable guide to this often engrossing music, his playing enhanced by the close but never airless sound’
– Gramophone, November 2008
William Sweeney: Tree o’ Licht
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Both musically impassioned and socially engaged, William Sweeney’s music is at its most eloquent when voiced by the cello, most human of instruments. The player navigates a stormy electronic landscape in the Borges-inspired The Poet Tells of his Fame, while Schumann lies behind the powerfully argued Sonata for Cello and Piano, recipient of a 2011 BASCA British Composer Award. The Sonata bears a joint dedication to Delphian artist Robert Irvine and to Erkki Lahesmaa – ‘keepers’, as Sweeney calls them, ‘of the cello’s inner voice’ – and Irvine is joined by his Finnish colleague here in the 2008 duo The Tree o’ Licht, in which Gaelic psalmody is transmuted into deepest instrumental expressivity.
‘luminous … an intriguing combination of exploration and introspection’ – The Independent, August 2013
Thomas Wilson: A Chamber Portrait
Edinburgh Quartet, Simon Smith piano, Allan Neave guitar
DCD34079
An influential figure both personally and musically, Thomas Wilson (1927–2001) was the leading light in a group of composers whose vision and technical assurance brought an international modernism into twentiethcentury Scottish music. In the chamber works collected here, moments of extraordinary stillness continually release into fast, propulsive writing whose compelling energies are matched by the individual and collective virtuosity of Simon Smith, Allan Neave and the Edinburgh Quartet.
‘Delphian are to be warmly congratulated for bringing these tough but elegant, closely argued and well-crafted works to a wider public … Superbly committed performances in vivid recordings’
– Tempo, October 2009
