Timely Tribute to Schnittke

Up until the early 1970s, Alfred Schnittke, who after Shostakovich took the next step in Russian music, coped with his times by rebellion, compliance and by extolling the crazy world he lived in. He wrote forbidden Modernist 12-tone music; he contributed dozens of scores in a popular idiom for films; and he developed what he called polystylism. That he refused to accept any single way of writing music struck a chord in the Russian psyche, as a symbol of an art that could not and would not be controlled by a Soviet bureaucracy or anything else. And Schnittke, Shostakovich descendant that he was, also did not hesitate to strike big chords literally, boldly hammering in his message.

But it was what happened in the 1970s that made Schnittke a great composer, and that now gives the composer’s music a special meaning for our own highly unsettled moment in history.

This year’s Eclectic Orange Festival, of course, had long before Sept. 11 invited the composer’s widow, pianist Irina Schnittke, to play two of Schnittke’s crucial works for piano and ensemble from the late 1970s; still the Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra and the Piano Quintet seemed utterly current. As the focus of its small tribute to Schnittke, the festival included the concerto in a program by the Chamber Orchestra Kremlin on Monday night at the Irvine Barclay Theatre; the quintet was on the Kronos Quartet’s program at the Founders Hall of the Orange Country Performing Arts Center on Tuesday night.

Neither of these gripping works is as maniacally polystylistic as are some of the most wildly preposterous earlier Schnittke scores. They are still all over the map, but there is an added spiritual intensity to the music, a searching for some kind of cohesive force. It is hard to say what that cohesive force is, but through all the unpredictable lurching between consonance and dissonance, through the periods of stuck-in-a-groove meditation and the outbursts of violence, there is something indefinable that now seems to be its controlling force.

It is probably an oversimplification to credit external events with leading Schnittke to this point in his music, although they clearly played an important role. One was the death of his mother in the early ‘70s; the quintet, completed in 1976, is a requiem in chamber music. The second was his first visit to the West in 1977, where he got a view of all the styles that composers were toying with; the concerto demonstrates a new confidence in appropriation as a means for seeking unity rather than as an expression of defiance.

The performances Monday and Tuesday were committed. The Chamber Orchestra Kremlin is a small ensemble of young Russian string players led by Misha Rachlevsky. His highly wrought conducting style doesn’t look as though it would achieve the concentrated, exact playing that it does. But he receives from his orchestra a rich, expertly blended sound; no matter how hard he pushes, the players’ intonation remains infallible. Collaborating with Irina Schnittke on the concerto, and surely with her encouragement, he asked for and repeatedly got bold climaxes.

The context of the program made the concerto sound all the more remarkable. It began with Schnittke’s “Suite in an Ancient Style” and ended with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. Both show the great Russian love for Mozart. The Schnittke is truly written in an 18th century style (it was adapted from his film score to “Adventures of a Dentist”); the Tchaikovsky, a well-loved work, is more romanticized, but both have similar impulses toward nostalgia.

As a last-minute addition, Rachlevsky added his arrangement for string orchestra of Schnittke’s Second String Quartet. Written in 1980 as a memorial to Russian filmmaker Larissa Shepitko, who died in a car accident, it is the beginning of a late style of music of great sadness. Rachlevsky’s arrangement, however, brings in a showy element of hysteria bluntly raising the emotional temperature.

Ironically, perhaps, the Kronos, which is nothing if not polystylistic to its core, better understands the restraint that can make Schnittke’s music so compelling. The collaboration with Irina Schnittke in the Piano Quintet was music making rapt and glowing. Kronos also knows a little something about musical translation, and it ended its program with an unlikely string quartet transcription of a movement from Schnittke’s Choir Concerto, “Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled With Grief,” that was devastatingly moving in its quiet severity.

For Kronos, Schnittke’s polystylism plays into a larger worldview. The program began with Terry Riley’s first work for string quartet, the alluring “Sunrise for a Planetary Dream Collector”; continued with a new piece by Michael Gordon, “Potassium”; and included a transcription by Sy Johnson of Charles Mingus’ “Myself When I Am Real.”

Gordon’s score is aggressive music of sliding tones that made a strong impression. A new work by Osvaldo Golijov had been promised, but the events of Sept. 11 caused him to change direction in the piece, and it is not yet finished. But Sofia Gubaidulina’s Fourth Quartet, written for Kronos in 1993, was a fitting replacement, with its eerie sonorities and exotic harmonies, which Gubaidulina, a synesthetic composer, associates with purples and greens that were effectively projected on the wall. The Kronos seems in particularly good form these days; every piece on the program not only sounded as though it belonged but also was superbly played.