If George Antheil (''Bad boy of music'' as he styled himself) had lived on into the 1960s, some- thing tells me that he would have been delighted with Alfred Schnittke's playful, irreverent ''polystylism'' (as Schnittke has called it himself). For just as Antheil flourished in 1920s Paris, writing a kind of punk-Stravinsky, so Schnittke provided a focus for the Moscow 'underground' in the late 1960s and 1970s with a blend of punk-expressionism and echt-Russian spirituality.
Not that Schnittke has merely adopted a latter-day epater les bourgeois attitude; he has cultivated his drastically violent musical language and his stylistic collisions because that's how he sees the essence of modern life (and partly, no doubt, because it appeals to the speculative German side of his temperament).
For a single representative example of polystylism look no further than the Concerto Grosso No. 1. The colliding elements are baroque cliches, tense chromatic crawlings and deliberately trite song or dance themes; the melange is put together with such flair and abandon that it has become probably his most performed, certainly his most recorded work. The rival BIS/Conifer recording is impressive enough, but this new DG one has a still more uninhibited, full-blooded quality, largely thanks to the trenchant contributions of Kremer and Grindenko. One or two details have been added—an extra harpsichord counterpoint here, some violin sul ponticello there—always to enhanced idiomatic effect, and the hellish journeys of the Toccata second movement and Rondo fifth movement are done with suitably appalling relish. My only reservation is that the soloists have been so closely miked as to place the ripieni at an unnecessary disadvantage.
There are more sledgehammer-horrors in Quasi una sonata, originally written for violin and piano (1968), but here in its 1987 orchestration. An ingenious rewriting it is too, especially in its transmuting of piano clusters and semi-aleatoric passages. This was the piece that first drew me to Schnittke, and I am inclined to pass over the passages of graffiti-scrawling harmonic indiscriminacy in favour of the immense conviction which radiates from the piece as a whole. Kremer digs in to the solo passages with tremendous ferocity—I hope the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Stradivarii doesn't get to hear of it.
Moz-Art a la Haydn (1977) is more of a jeu d'esprit, a theatrical elaboration of the extant fragments of Mozart's pantomime music K416d—'a la Haydn' because the musicians eventually file out a la Haydn Farewell Symphony. Only a chip from the workbench this, but it makes a mildly amusing conclusion to a well-recorded, outstandingly well-played compilation of Schnittke's chamber orchestra works.'