Реквием А.Г. Шнитке

In the year of the 50th anniversary of its founding, the Moscow State Academic Chamber Choir presents a new album named Alfred Schnittke. Requiem. The first recording with the new artistic director Timofei Golberg continues and develops the collective’s traditions: Vladimir Minin, the founder, first artistic director, and president of the choir (since 2019) has invariably paid great attention to the promotion of contemporary music. 

The Requiem is one of Schnittke’s most conceptual statements. The idea was born while he was working on the Piano Quintet. Initially, one of the movements of this work was an instrumental requiem in miniature. Soon Schnittke received a commission order from the Mossovet State Academic Theater to write a score for the play Don Carlos (based on the tragedy by Friedrich Schiller). The Requiem was to be the basis of the score. However, the piece outgrew the predetermined framework. Schnittke postponed his work on the Quintet for the sake of the Requiem, which was completed in 1975 and premiered in 1977 in Budapest, Hungary. In Schnittke’s homeland, the former USSR, the work was copied on magnetic tape for a long time, and enthusiastic responses were literally passed from mouth to mouth. The Requiem’s most important feature (and, at the same time, the major difficulty for the performers) is the bold combination of styles (from the Baroque to avant-garde), “high” and “low,” “a precious fusion of depth and simplicity” (the phrase from “Subjective Notes on Objective Performance,” Schnittke’s famous review of the pianist Alexei Lubimov's recital – Soviet Music magazine, No. 2, 1974). The lineup itself is a visible realization of contrasts: along with the choir and organ, which are traditional for sacred music, we have the piano, celesta, percussion and wind ensemble, electric guitar and bass guitar. The fourteen movements mostly reproduce the classical model (Mozart’s Requiem was Schnittke’s ideal), and only one of them (the thirteenth, Credo) is usually absent in the Requiem. However, Schnittke introduced it to make the composition more dynamic. The last movement repeats the first. The work uses the traditional Latin text of the funeral service. The Requiem is at the same time one of the highest expressions of polystylistics (the principle formulated by the composer means that literally all the sounds of our world become a material for a creator) and Schnittke’s so-called “new simplicity.” The work is imbued with the spirit of spontaneity. Schnittke said: “The Requiem appeared apart from my conscious efforts” (Dmitri Shulgin. Alfred Schnittke’s Years of Obscurity. Conversations with the Composer, M., 1993). Professor Valentina Kholopova, one of the main researchers of his work, musicologist, and doctor of art history, noted: “Schnittke composed the Requiem as easily as if this music had been presented to him. One movement, Sanctus, was in his dream, and he woke up with a ready-made sound” (Composer Alfred Schnittke. Chelyabinsk, Arkaim, 2003). It was Sanctus that Alfred Schnittke considered the best part of his work. The album also features the Three Sacred Hymns for a cappella mixed choir. The piece written in one summer night in 1984 was the result of Schnittke’s acquaintance with Russian sacred music (in particular, with Dmitri Bortnyansky’s choral concertos) in the early 1980s. With all obvious references to the Orthodox musical tradition (the movements “Hail Mary, full of grace,” “Lord Jesus Christ,” and “The Lord’s prayer”), this small (about seven and a half minutes long) piece also refers to the spiritual and musical experience of Western Christianity. Among the Schnittke works, the Three Sacred Hymns is a kind of island of joy and light.