Mannes Piano Recital: Vladimir Feltsman Performs Schnittke

Friday evening's recital at Mannes's downtown location featured only two works, both of them by the late twentieth century composer Alfred Schnittke.  The event was curated by pianist Vladimir Feltsman who also took part in the performance of the second work.

It is only recently that Schnittke's importance to the development of serious music has come to be appreciated by the general public.  This despite the fact that, following the death of Shostakovich in 1975, Schnittke was generally recognized by critics as the preeminent Soviet composer of his day, a thinker who exerted a strong influence on other artists not only in Russia but abroad as well.  In January, an entire week of concerts and recitals was staged in his honor and that of his associates at a Julliard Focus series whose highlights included performances of both the Fourth and Eighth symphonies in addition to a number of his chamber works.

Schnittke was a theoretician as well as a composer and wrote a series of seminal essays, the most noteworthy of which dealt with with his espousal of polystylism.  According to this theory, high and low forms of music are combined within a single piece in order to provide to the listener additional associations that enrich the meaning of the work at hand.  Schnittke's interest in such a combination may very well have developed from the schizophrenic nature of his own career.  Since his serious work was repressed by Soviet authorities and remained largely unplayed, Schnittke was forced to earn a living as a composer of film scores.  This was not so unique an occurrence as one might imagine.  Following the uproar over Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, Shostakovich spent much of the following year performing a similar task while all the while keeping a very low profile.  Music for films was considered a safe and acceptable outlet for otherwise problematic Soviet composers as such an activity did not carry with it the political implications entailed in the composition of more public works, such as symphonies.  At any rate, in a biographical essay, Alexander Ivashkin claimed that Schnittke completed as many as 66 such film scores.  No wonder then that Schnittke wrote in his essay "On Concerto Grosso No. 1" the following:

"For several years I experienced an inward urge to write music for the cinema and theater.  At first I enjoyed doing this, then it became a burden, and then it dawned on me: my lifelong task would be to bridge the gap between serious music and music entertainment, even if I broke my neck in the process.  I have this dream of a unified style where fragments of serious music and fragments of music for entertainment would not just be scattered about in a frivolous way, but would be the elements of a diverse musical reality..."

Friday's program opened with a performance by Baron Fenwick, a Mannes student taught by Feltsman, of Schnittke's Piano Sonata No. 1 (1987).  And certainly there could be no greater authority on the work than Feltsman himself as the sonata had been written specifically for him by Schnittke.  In fact, the composer had placed within the score notes that represented both his own and Feltsman's names and from these derived the theme for the entire work.  The sonata turned out to be an incredibly complex and technically demanding piece that showed the great faith Schnittke must have had in Feltsman's abilities as a pianist.  Here, the student Fenwick gave a brilliant performance of the sonata that allowed the listener to fully appreciate its worth.

In the second half of the program (there was no intermission, only a brief pause), Feltsman himself took over the piano for a rendition of the Piano Quintet (1972-1976) that Schnittke had composed in memory of his mother.  Feltsman was joined for the occasion by four very talented Mannes student string players - Hojin Kim, violin; Yuti Chang, violin; Adam Kramer, viola; and Zexun Shen, cello.  As the work progressed, it became clear that this five-movement quintet, which I had never before heard, was indeed one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century chamber repertoire and on a par with that Shostakovich had composed in the same genre.  Though dark and complex, this difficult piece certainly deserves to be heard more often.  I thought it superior, perhaps due to its long gestation, to other of the composer's chamber works I'd heard in the past.  In the end, the quintet proved a truly moving and heartfelt tribute to a departed loved one.

At the conclusion of the recital, Feltsman spoke to the audience about his own friendship with Schnittke.  It is always fascinating to listen to the remarks of a virtuoso who has actually known and been an associate of a famous composer.  The pianist's remarks enhanced the audience's appreciation of this amazing composer and, in a sense, brought him to life before us.