00:00 - I : Moderato
06:01 - II:
10:24 - III: Largo
14:13 - IV:
15:59 - Minuet

Description from allmusic.com :

"Alfred Schnittke's late works are strange birds indeed. They often mix moments of searing pathos and gnarled humor within a general fabric of obliquity. The atmosphere is rare, unpredictable, transparent and restless. The characters that parade across these landscapes are no longer the fake-Mozarts and ad hoc-Bachs of Schnittke's earlier "polystylism"; they're more like those bizarre beast-men from Hieronymous Bosch's Renaissance paintings -- painstakingly crafted, ugly little creatures whose grotesqueries evoke an inexplicable compassion.
Schnittke's Concerto for Three is such a creation, written in 1994 -- less than five years before Schnittke's death. Its genre alone makes it unusual: it is, as title implies, a concerto for string orchestra and three soloists, specifically violin-viola-cello (with only one precedent I can think of, by Sir Michael Tippett). And then its rare dedication, to three of the 20th-century's greatest Russian string players, Mstislav Rostropovich (cello), Yuri Bashmet (viola), and Gidon Kremer (violin), all close friends of Schnittke. But in another strange, almost comically perverse move, Schnittke never has the three soloists play together until the fourth, last and briefest movement.
And then there is the work's title. While it serves a descriptive function, its original Russian designation "na troikh" is also used to describe a Russian drinking custom: because Vodka is expensive in Russian restaurants, men will seek each other out via "the red nose," to share a bottle in an archway--as Rostropovich says, "the darker the better."
But this rather light-hearted title inscribes a work of heavier heart, a piece whose musically oddities inhabit darker archways. Schnittke had previously suffered two strokes, one in 1985 and another in 1992, and along with his health his artistic outlook had changed substantially. Whereas the Schnittke of the 1970's and 80's "had the sense that things outside myself had a specific crystalline structure," he confessed after his first stroke that "Now things are different: I can no longer see this crystalline structure, only incessantly shifting, unstable forms.--Our world seems to me to be a world of illusions, unlimited and unending. There is a realm of shadows in it"
That realm of shadows, of fearing and searching, perfectly describes the music and form of the Concerto for Three. The piece begins in the darkest and heaviest register of the basses and cellos, led by the cello soloist; the extraordinary texture gives "craggy" a new name, as the instruments weave and wheeze a web of knotty polyphony. After its abysmal ending, the second movement unfolds a new search in different dimensions; the soloist is now viola, spinning a more limpid line among a higher, more translucent orchestral texture. The third movement introduces the violin, expanding a very wide melos upon silvery 13-part clusters; the atmosphere is introspective. The Concerto's transition from opening to penultimate movement is thus a move from exterior to interior, withdrawing from an antagonistic "world of illusions" into a steady monologue.
This sets the stage for the absolutely indecipherable last movement. The cello and orchestral counterparts burst in with a ferocious sawing figure, fast and brutal. Soon viola and violas enter with an misplaced rising melody, and are followed by violins and their soloist, ever-ascending with their own screeching triple-stops.
This is poster-board cacophony, a muddled melee rather than the three-way dialogue we've been anticipating, and Schnittke brings it to a cruel, inexplicable stop with a slamming cluster from--a piano. Schnittke has brought this ascending bird back into the "real" world of infinite illusions, in which the only end is fatality. Or is it? Perhaps not: see Schnittke's Minuet."

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