By 1990 Schnittke had largely abandoned the stylistic juggling acts which offer easy access to the first-time listener. In their absence it sometimes seemed he had nothing better to offer than undisciplined ranting, a kind of emotional St Vitus’s Dance devoid of a context or poles of tension to give it deeper meaning. But the Second Cello Concerto is far better than that.
Its intrinsic drama is there in microcosm in the first 30 seconds, as the orchestra tries to strangle the cello’s passionate monologue at birth. What follows is 42 minutes of essentially the same process, enacted in five alternately slow and fast movements and culminating in the mother of all passacaglias. It’s like experiencing a moment of emotional catastrophe, when the only thing to hang on to is the knowledge that the trauma cannot last, except that here it does last; and you’re forced to stare it full in the face.
What keeps me listening, apart from sheer masochism, are the faint glimpses of Schnittke’s polystylistic past, of Bergian nostalgia, of the familiar haven of the Chamber of Horrors where at least you know the horror is staged and not in your own head; those things plus a quite remarkably intense performance. Even more than the inspirational Rostropovich (the concerto’s dedicatee) and the admirable Thorleif Thedeen, Alexander Ivashkin takes me right to the core of the music, and there is far more understanding in the Russian orchestral playing than on either of the rival discs. So the concerto’s emotional rawness feels like a positive asset, and the returning themes also register more potently, allowing a sense of overall musical control to take shape (it’s almost worth playing those opening 30 seconds a few times over, because the melodic shape is crucial to the whole work). Try and switch off from this music and it sucks you back in, its impotent fury haunting you for days after.
By comparison (K)ein Sommernachtstraum is little more than a piece d’occasion, and more generous makeweights could have been devised (not least the wonderful In memoriam on Sony Classical). Still, its fake rococo Minuet, subjected to Schnittke’s habitual harmonic dyslexia, has its own queasy appeal. Here Chandos’s recording quality is richer and more detailed than BIS’s. In the concerto the balance gives the cello star billing, and Ivashkin lives up to it.'