Symphony No.6 - Alfred Schnittke

Russian State Symphony Orchestra conducted by Valery Polyansky

I - Allegro moderato: 0:00
II - Presto: 17:53
III - Adagio: 22:06
IV - Allegro vivace: 31:43

Schnittke's Sixth Symphony was written in 1992 as a commission by Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, conducted at the time by Mstislav Rostropovich. The work was premiered in Moscow on November 25, 1993, by the same orchestra and conductor. The work was shortly revised, deleting numerous pauses and silences between the bars, which made the music much more energetic, condensed and articulated. The composition of the symphony coincided with Schnittke's work on the orchestration of the first two acts of his opera "Faust". Hence the similarities between instrumentation and thematic materials.

At a concert in Carnegie Hall on 6th February 1994, almost half of the audience left during the performance. Those who stayed acclaimed the composer with a standing ovation. In great contrast to the previous symphonies of Schnittke, the score of the sixth contains almost no passages for full orchestra; the orchestra plays in groups only, and the actual texture of the music seems to be ascetically dry and abstract. One has to listen attentively, to penetrate the musical material itself, in order to gradually become accustomed to this ascetically sparse texture, so strange on first hearing.

The first movement begins with a chord systematically built up and tied into a careful knot. Its impact is explosive; and out of the ashes emerge very concentrated cells, like split-off remnants saved by grace. These remnants are grouped as quavers, a semitone first, then involving different intervals which are repeated. A part-theme first heard on violas emerges from this. But it is Schnittke's use of the brass that is of particular importance. Three trombones state a chorale-type theme which looms over the movement. Not only does this summon the spirit of Bruckner; it is the instrumentation recognizable within the Faust opera which is consciously being invoked here, as well as in its very essence: the vocal writing of Faust's three lamentations.

The shattered remnants sound like supplications. These pleas reach a level of crying intensity before the instrumental texture (double basses at the same time, bolstering and softening the sound of three horns) collapses into it's lower state. Schnittke then replaced what were originally four silent bars with a timpani crescendo. Flint-like stabbing mosaics set the sonata form of the opening movement on its course again, the interval of one whole tone becoming more and more prominent. A new sense of agitation leads to a steeply rising motive, before the opening unmollifiable chord returns, drawing the music to a close.

The second movement is a scherzo. It is a very bellicose retort to aspects of the preceding Allegro. Those granite inlaid spokes jab away, while on four trumpets there is a new variation of Schnittke's disciplined interconnecting ideas of intervals (particularly that of the semitone, this time in semiquavers). Its bickering pace requires considerable virtuosity. The patterpattern is crystallized first in a passage for divided strings: it returns twice, first between four trumpets, later on strings but this time sul ponticello, which has clear links with a harrowing other-worldly passage in the final movement of Shostakovich's last string quartet. The tribute Schnittke is paying his great Russian precursor is then humorously crowned by the lonely if gadfly appearance of a solo piccolo, recalling the piccolo's role in Shostakovich's own Sixth Symphony.

The third movement opens with a theme comprising twelve notes, while permutations of the twelve-note row are simultaneously at work in the harmony. Indeed, at its reprise, a melodic line truly sings out, unfettered. Schnittke has here created a refreshing musical way of marshalling the row of twelve notes. Yet he appears to be aware that there is also something delusory about this supposed solution. The bass clarinet, supported by two bassoons, make within a four-note cell an oblique reference to the opening of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. As Schnittke nears the end of the Adagio, a piercing interval leap, and then the further unfolding of a twelve-note permutation, is fiIIed with a new pathos.

(Description continued in the comments section.)

Picture: "Woman Torso" (1932) by the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich.

Sources: https://bit.ly/3avLex0 and https://bit.ly/34qPutN

Видео Symphony No.6 - Alfred Schnittke канала Sergio Cánovas