Alfred Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No. 1 by Peter J. Schmelz (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 171 ultimately fell out of favour when it became increasingly dangerous to mention Russian icons or the avant-garde in the 1920s and ’30s. Murray’s essay does much to recover the impact his work had on the development of the Russian avant-garde and serves as an excellent ‘reminder of the cruelty and injustice of the Communist system’ (p. 228). In the volume’s final essay, Jennifer Brewin analyses the works of the Soviet Georgian painter Ucha Japaridze in terms of how he incorporated elements of Byzantine stylization and spiritual content connected with the Symbolist tradition into paintings that only seem to abide by the canonical tenets of Socialist Realism. By far the longest essay in the volume, the work sometimes suffers from trying to address too many themes at once. The section on images of women in Japaridze’s works and in Georgian culture, for example, could easily have been a gripping stand-alone article but was somewhat lost within the larger piece. This essay also felt slightly out of sync with the larger scope of the volume in that it referenced artworks which pushed well beyond the immediate aftermath of the revolution and the titular theme of ‘Russian Art’. Its inclusion makes one contemplate the volume’s overall periodization and its concentrated focus on the first decades of the twentieth century, to the detriment in particular of earlier periods. In the introduction to the volume, Hardiman and Kozicharow acknowledge this lacuna and briefly mention how major painters from the 1830s–70s (such as Aleksandr Ivanov, Vasilii Perov, Nikolai Ge and Ivan Kramskoi) foreshadowed other spiritually-oriented artists who came later. In the end, an essay on this earlier period would only have shown with greater force ‘the diversity of approaches among modern artists to the notion of spirituality’ (p. 31). This variety is the true strength of the volume as a whole; it is the range of artists, historians and collectors under discussion which truly show how vital the intersection between art and spirituality was under the condition of modernity. Department of Visual Arts Allison Leigh University of Louisiana at Lafayette Schmelz, Peter J. Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1. Oxford Keynotes. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2019. xiii + 162 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Tables. Appendix. Additional sources for reading and listening. Notes. Index. £10.99 (paperback). The latest book in the Oxford Keynotes series offers a thoughtful and detailed analysis of one of Schnittke’s best-known works and the piece that helped to make his compositions known in the West. The chapters follow the six parts of the Concerto Grosso No. 1: ‘Preludio’, ‘Toccata’, ‘Recitativo’, ‘Cadenza’, SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 172 ‘Rondo’ and ‘Postludio’; each of them begins with a brief but vivid description of the actual sounds or events of the movement, followed by an account of the background and context of the concerto grosso as a whole and, particularly, the part featured in the chapter. The last, ‘Postludio’, is the broadest, assessing not only this piece but the rise and fall of Schnittke’s reputation, both during his life and after his early death. Professor Schmelz, already known for his work on late twentieth-century and contemporary music, deals very readably with complex compositional, phenomenological and purely musical issues, enlivening his account of Schnittke’s world with a profusion of quotations from the composer himself, Western and Russian composers, critics and historians of music, several of them previously unremarked in literature of the subject. The author’s researches make this easily the most comprehensive account of a work that, apart from numerous concert performances, has been used in many different contexts from important films to a vulgarized version of it as malevolence at the quasi-historical opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. Polystylistic composing is likely to lead to many different, often contradictory interpretations. Amongst the best critics, following the pioneering work of Alexander Ivashkin, have been Svetlana Savenko, the violinists Gidon Kremer and Oleh Krysa, and, of course, Schmelz himself; some critics and members of the public, however, have shown themselves quite closed to Schnittke’s new sound world, most obtuse amongst them being...