Since so much of Alfred Schnittke's music deals with loss, it's nice to know he has a sense of humor about it. There is an ironic, winking kind of loss in some of Schnittke's music -- that kind of irreversible loss that means you're just as free to go as to stick around and play with what's left.

That's the tone surrounding works like Schnittke's Moz-Art a la Haydn (1976/77) for two violins and small string orchestra. The work is based on something we'll never have in full: Mozart's unfinished "pantomime music" K. 446. Schnittke is often attracted by such fragments; he has used them in such works as the second movement of his Fourth Concerto Grosso/Fifth Symphony of 1988. Yet while that work is intensely serious, this one is slight, witty, and inviting. It appears to be inspired by the collaboration involved in Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No. 1, written in the same years for the famous duo of Russian violinists, Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Gridenko. Like the slightly more earnest Concerto Grosso, Moz-Art a la Haydn derives a good deal of its effects from an ensuing comedy of errors and estrangements.

The title Moz-Art a la Haydn is itself part of the joke. "Mozart" is obvious, though Schnittke's actual use of the older composer's music is limited only to what actually remains of Mozart's pantomime, the first violin part. That's not much to base a piece on, and hence Schnittke's portmanteau "Moz-Art," which in German essentially means "Sort-of." As for "a la Haydn," that comes in Schnittke's "scherzando" attitude -- surely a nod to Haydn's own famous sense of humor.

However, Schnittke also exploits a very specific Hadyn technique. In Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony (No. 45), the composer wanted (as legend goes) to send a message to his patron Prince Esterhazy, who had kept the court musicians in the country, away from their families, for much too long. Thus at the end of the Symphony, Haydn instructs the players to leave the stage, one by one, blowing out their candles as they leave; in the last bars, only the first two violinists remain.

Schnittke, of course, ups the ante. His piece begins in total darkness, each of the thirteen players onstage gradually beginning to improvise on Mozart's fragment. The lights finally break this funhouse atmosphere when the ensemble pounces on a fully diminished chord, played in loud tremolo. Conductor on-stage, ensemble poised, they commence a fantastical Allegretto which Schnittke spins out like a musical marionette theater. Sometimes he treats the fragment "sincerely," attempting to reconstruct it within an imaginary return to late-1700s musical style. But, as critic David Fanning put it, Schnittke often treats this sort-of-Mozart "with the detached bemusement of a visitor from outer space confronting an artifact from a dead civilization."

This approach is in many ways a venerable Russian tradition, that of the yurodivy, the clown or "holy fool" who, standing ever outside reality, frequently offers the most cutting, authentic commentary upon it. This is the art of making heavy statements with perfect levity -- a kind of alchemy of weights -- and Schnittke performs it here with the expertise of his forefathers Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

The escapades must eventually end when one soloist de-tunes her violin; as the lights (or candles) fade, the performers begin to shuffle offstage a la Haydn, and eventually only the conductor is left, beating an absent music to an absent orchestra.

(AllMusic)

Please take note that the audio AND sheet music ARE NOT mine. Feel free to change the video quality to a minimum of 480p for the best watching experience.

Performers: Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko (violin), Chamber Orchestra of Europe

свернуть