Cello Concerto No. 1

Program notes

About the Work

In the spring of 1985 Alfred Schnittke began a cello concerto for Natalia Gutman, on a commission from Munich, where the new Gasteig cultural centre was about to open. He had sketched a work in three movements when, in July, he suffered a severe stroke. He was fifty. He spent weeks in hospital and came close to death; when he recovered, with his health permanently damaged, he took the concerto up again where he had left it. It was finished the following year and first played in Munich on 7 May 1986 by Gutman, its dedicatee, with the Munich Philharmonic under Eri Klas.

The piece that came out of the illness was not the piece he had planned. The third movement, intended as a broad finale, turned out short, and a fourth movement was added after it: a long, slow song for the cello that Schnittke had not foreseen and that now gives the whole concerto its meaning. It is hard to hear the work without that story, and there is no need to try.

Schnittke was by then one of the best known Soviet composers of the generation after Shostakovich, famous for what he called polystylism, music that set Baroque gestures, tangos, hymns and modernist noise side by side. This concerto belongs to a later, plainer manner. It is a drama for one voice against many, lasting close to forty minutes, with an orchestra that includes piano, celesta, harpsichord and a large percussion section.

What to Listen For

The concerto opens with the cello alone, heavily (the marking is Pesante), turning over a short questioning figure. The orchestra enters like an echo of the soloist’s line and slowly grows independent of it. This is the pattern for the first movement: the cello leads, the orchestra follows, swells, and at the peaks of its great waves simply drowns the soloist. A cadenza builds to a climax in which the opening question returns as a shout, and the movement breaks off.

The second movement, a Largo, looks for a way out through stillness. The orchestra offers chorale-like themes and the cello, in its most vulnerable voice, joins one of them before climbing to the top of its range. The third is fast and sounds at first like a finale: a sharp-edged march and a whirl of dance figures with a grotesque tinge that recalls Shostakovich. It does not last. The chorale from the slow movement crashes in at the height of the noise and the soloist is swept away.

Then the cello begins again, quietly, feeling its way towards a melody. This last Largo is the true finale. The tune is simple and hymn-like, and it climbs by steps, repeated and reinforced as more and more of the orchestra joins. The score calls for the cello to be amplified, which lets the line carry over the full ensemble. Whether the ending is a triumph or something more hard-won and exhausted is left open, and good performances keep it open.