Track Listing

1. Symphony No. 1: I. Senza tempo - Moderato - Allegro - Andante
2. Symphony No. 1: II. Allegretto -
3. Symphony No. 1: III. Lento -
4. Symphony No. 1: IV. Lento

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148322 in Music
• Released on: 1996-04-23
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .22 pounds

Customer Reviews

Excessive, rambling and incoherent--but utterly gripping
Alfred Schnittke's First Symphony is one of the most extraordinary works to have come out of Soviet music. Written between 1969 and 1972 this symphony--or unsymphony as the composer originally intended to call it--attempts to sum up the whole of the world around the composer in a frenetic collage. One commentator has described this work as "The Gulag Archipelago of Soviet Music", another as "a massive temper tantrum". The truth lies somewhere in between.

The work is in fact in the standard four movements--sixty-five minutes in total--but that is about as far as the resemblances go to a conventional symphony. The first movement starts with the sound of chiming bells, before the musicians enter the hall one by one, improvising. When the conductor arrives, the music halts, only to start up again in a set of parodic episodes, including an improvisatory trombone cadenza. At the climax of the movement, the entire orchestra start shouting, before the music lurches into the transition between the last two movements of Beethoven's 5th symphony, then collapses entirely.

The second movement is just as chaotic. It starts with vigorously rhythmic pseudo-Baroquery, before drums intrude and convert this into a parodic march. Suddenly, this breaks off for a semi-improvised violin-and-piano cadenza, before the Baroque parody returns. Eventually the orchestration thins down, leading into the elegiac third movement.

This is a more conventionally serious piece of writing, even if the nasty jokes of the other movements occasionally intrude. Written serially, this movement builds up to a massive tragic climax, which fades away, leading straight into the finale.

The finale begins with a collage of other composers' work, before clarifying into a set of episodes based on the Dies Irae. As these become more and more excessive, they break down into a free jazz improvisation, followed by a biting parody of a contemporary Russian pop hit. A cadenza for organ and timpani leads into an enormous pile-up where much of the material of the whole symphony is compressed into a short period. After this, the musicians begin to leave the stage until a single violin is left, playing the 'Farewell' motif from the Haydn symphony, before the chiming of bells brings the work back to the opening, and the performers return to the stage. The music ends with a single note being pounded out, fortissimo, against pounding drums.

This is a remarkable work--one almost guaranteed to fail, but nonetheless extremely powerful, particularly in as gripping a performance as this one. I wouldn't want to listen to it often, but when I return to it, I am usually surprised at how well-written and effective it is. In some ways, despite the differences in musical language between the two composers, I feel this is perhaps the closest any other composer has come to the late works of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. (Certainly, the often-cited comparisons between this work and Berio's Sinfonia seem pointless to me.)

I'd give 200 stars if that were possible.
Of all the pieces written for orchestra, none equal Alfred Schnittke's "Symphony No. 1." It was this piece by Schnittke that I happened to hear on a public radio station. I was in shock. I had never heard anything as wonderful as this piece. From then on I searched more and more about Schnittke but still never coming across his First Symphony. But he has gotten much more notice in America recently and now there are two very good recordings of this piece. Both are fairly easy to come by now. If you are not familiar to his music, it contains within it a collage of styles and emotions. At one point you will be faced with huge walls of sound while other times you will be transported to Baroque orchestra.... until it all goes haywire. If you listen to anything by Schnittke and don't feel emotionally drained afterwards, you must have been asleep.

I'd give 200 stars if that were possible.
Of all the pieces written for orchestra, none equal Alfred Schnittke's "Symphony No. 1." It was this piece by Schnittke that I happened to hear on a public radio station. I was in shock. I had never heard anything as wonderful as this piece. From then on I searched more and more about Schnittke but still never coming across his First Symphony. But he has gotten much more notice in America recently and now there are two very good recordings of this piece. Both are fairly easy to come by now. If you are not familiar to his music, it contains within it a collage of styles and emotions. At one point you will be faced with huge walls of sound while other times you will be transported to Baroque orchestra.... until it all goes haywire. If you listen to anything by Schnittke and don't feel emotionally drained afterwards, you must have been asleep.