Orchestra Uncovers Bittersweet Schnittke Work

Now in their second season, Leanna Sterios and the Opus Chamber Orchestra are trying to make a little more headway on the scene. Stocked with leading players from various Los Angeles orchestras, they now have William Kraft, a distinguished composer-in-residence, on board, and Sunday afternoon in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium’s Gold Room, they snagged a West Coast premiere from the voluminous catalog of Alfred Schnittke, the enigmatic Russian composer who died just over a year ago.

In doing so, they picked a disturbingly intense work from near the end of Schnittke’s life, the Concerto for Three, in which the composer, weakened by a series of strokes, seems to combine Russian pessimism with a gritty determination to keep working. The three soloists speak separately at first--a tough, growling opening movement for cello and low strings; a bleak second movement for viola; a lyrical, lonely third movement for violin--and then combine forces in a short, furious, desperate-sounding finale that is slammed shut by a crunched piano chord.

The polystylistic sendups and spirituality of earlier Schnittke do not surface here, and the mood, if not the musical language, suggests the death-obsessed last period of Schnittke’s father figure, Shostakovich. Yet there is ambiguity in that final chord; you cannot decide whether the ending is wacky or chilling or both; and the encore, a somewhat anguished Menuet that Schnittke wrote as an appendage to the Concerto, seems to indicate that life, however bittersweet, does go on. Violinist Julie Gigante, violist Simon Oswell and especially cellist Armen Ksadjikian performed the solo parts passionately, and Kraft made a cameo appearance with the lone piano chord.

Mozart’s Divertimento in F, K. 138, served as a not-too-convincing warmup; the playing was cohesive yet listless. The concluding Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings opened somewhat gingerly, but Sterios gradually was able to develop a lilting rhythm in the opening movements, some deep lyrical feeling in the Elegie and vivacity in the Finale. The Gold Room’s relatively dry acoustics were not flattering to the Opus strings; one hopes matters improved at the scheduled repeat performance Monday at the Colburn School.

Meanwhile, the most appropriate space of all for this group, nearby Ambassador Auditorium, remains dark.