THOUGHTS about WHY I intensely dislike Schnittke’s
Concerto Grosso No. 1. (In the spirit of,
“TO PROTECT THE BEAUTIFUL….study the ugly.”)
Now, I certainly do not dislike this particular performance,
which is here excellent and played not only w/o conductor,
but with fine technique and conviction…
No, I dislike it as a musical language.
Why? I find it thoroughly and utterly repulsive 2nd-hand
music, a kind of inauthentic, self-conscious, uninspired,
fake modernism.
It assaults me with what I can only call a kind of cheap
bag-of-tricks, kitsch continuity, full of gratuitous interruptions
and interpolations. An attempt is made to cover up this
inherent weakness with largely arbitrary and unbearably
mechanical repetitions, including trite little canonic triplet
figures, as well as the return insertion of whole blocks of
sound. All and all, Schnittke’s music seems informed by
an inorganic conceptual approach which, in my view, does
great violence to the richness of natural acoustic sound.
This in turn lends itself to a thick, heavy string timbre,
both individually and as an ensemble, with an equally
questionable, heavy, constant vibrato.
I can only say that it leaves me, even when played quite
well, with an indifferent “so what.” This naturally results
from the uncomfortable contradiction we sense when
we hear a VERY GOOD performance of VERY BAD music.
What makes music, in my view, really sound alive and new
is the inimitable clear sparkling energy of intelligence of
discovery. Despite the epithets, “thrilling,” “brilliant,”
intrepid,” for me, there’s no discovery, here.
♫ A Far Cry - Schnittke: Concerto Grosso no.1 (1977),
V. Rondo: Agitato http://bit.ly/QLKT6W