Alfred Schnittke - Septet for Ensemble (1981-82) [Score-Video]

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George N. Gianopoulos, composer

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@rabbit-munch-carrots 4 жыл бұрын

The minimalism that gave way to the waltz was fantastic!

@seaotter4439 5 жыл бұрын

From allmusic.com Alfred Schnittke's Septet (violin, viola, cello, flute, two clarinets, and harpsichord doubling organ) is a strange and little-known work. Written and premiered in Moscow in 1982, it carries many of Schnittke's stylistic hallmarks: its three-movement form, its panoply of styles in the middle movement, its sharp-fanged sense of humor, and its soulful, melancholy coda. Yet the Septet somehow feels aloof, even for Schnittke, and its long slow finale is one of the more haunting, uncompromising things in the composer's whole output. The Septet's brief first movement is, like many first movements in Schnittke's concerti, less an independent structure than a kind of accidental introduction; the work's main materials are first encountered here, but less like sure-footed statements than floating space-wreckage. The curtain opens on an impoverished stage, and the composer seems to derive a certain emotive force from consenting to make do with what little has been given to him. That little is turned to hilarious use in the middle movement. Middle movements in Schnittke are always injected with multiple personalities -- parodies on steroids. They are the place where something catastrophic unfolds, usually from initially good intentions. Here the parody appears to be American minimalism and the catastrophe ensues as the music falls into a motley, Old European folksiness. The motives heard in the first movement now churn out a Perpetuum mobile, figures repeating themselves exactly, then gradually changing and exchanging figures. The technique is strongly reminiscent of Steve Reich's works from the 1970s (Music for Eighteen Musicians, Music for a Large Ensemble, etc.), but Schnittke's treatment here destroys any of the seriousness, closure, and perfection aimed for in Reich's works. Instead of a well-oiled, blossoming mechanism, Schnittke's Perpetuum soon starts to fall apart like a dehumanized machine. Motives become increasingly chromatic and ungainly, gestures more and more awkward; any sense of ideal ensemble, so essential to Reich's music, is broken by the gangly grotesquerie of Schnittke's lines. Eventually, things descend into an inane waltz, very similar to the waltz in Alban Berg's 1923 opera Wozzeck: it is waltz of drunkenness before expiration, and moves like a schizoid marionette. Turning 70s American minimalism into 20s European expressionism before your very ears seems an alchemy Schnittke couldn't resist. The last movement also commits a strange kind of transformation, but of a subtler, more static kind. It opens out only after the previous Perpetuum has strangled itself on a single reiterated pitch (Schnittke's middle movements frequently do themselves in this way). Suddenly the mood is completely opposite: now a slow Chorale, expansively, loose-limbed, lost in its own diffuse harmony. The model for this movement seems to be the finale of Schnittke's Third Symphony. Both movements have the same texture: a very Bach-like chorale stands as the ancient bedrock for a thick web of interlaced polyphonic lines above. The impression is a kind of soulful homelessness, a spirit disoriented in its own purgatorial body; this feeling resonates in much of Schnittke, and seems to come from his own ethnic, religious, and artistic rootlessness. Near the end of this musical labyrinth, the soulless Perpetuum returns, bursting in with traitor violence. The mood is ruined now, but the chorale-music returns nonetheless, and seals this odd, unsettling work in a kind of restful somnambulism.