Alfred Schnittke's Film Music (Part 1 - Olympia)

(This will be the first in a five part set of posts devoted to Alfred Schnittke's film music. These posts will be spread across the next month or so)

Music for the films 'The Story of an Unknown Actor', 'Sport, Sport, Sport', 'Agony', and 'Music for an Imaginary Play'
USSR Cinematography Symphony Orchestra/Emin Khachaturian
Olympia OCD 606 | Stereo AAD

We all go through that phase as teenagers, don't we? That sort of emo phase where we equate life with pain and indulge ourselves in proclaiming all sorts of embarrassing pseudo-profundities; in constant mourning for... something. Some of us, God help us, go a little further than that and immortalize this mawkish period in torrents of poetic inspiration etched into reams of college ruled, spiral bound notebook paper. I never went that far myself having discovered even then that I lack the talent for lyric expression, but I did take to listening to appropriately "dark" music. Alfred Schnittke's music was a constant companion of mine in those days. His very bleak, joyless sound world offered this young listener the perfect vehicle which to exorcise some of his angst. After I turned 20 or so, Schnittke and I began drifting apart. Life, while sometimes not the "best of all possible worlds", is still something of great beauty and a privilege to be able to have at all. Schnittke's world view is rather foreign to my own these days. But some of Schnittke's work still speaks to me. His First Symphony and Faust Cantata, among other works, are undeniably great and thrilling music. His film music is also very attractive and far better than a lot of people, including perhaps the composer himself, would give them credit for. This Olympia album showcases Schnittke at his lyrical and sometimes goofiest best, but there's plenty of strength and craft here. We're light years away from the nauseously saccharine world of your typical "Hollywood" soundtrack.

Like Shostakovich before him, Schnittke wrote a very sizeable quantity of film music--over 60 scores in all--and like his predecessor, film work was one of his few sources of income during times when the man and his concert work had ran afoul of the Soviet appratchiks. Schnittke's film music sometimes suffered as well. In the case of his music for Elem Klimov's Agony, the Soviet authorities went so far as to order the destruction of the soundtrack and score. But on the whole, his film music is very approachable and witty and would be very welcome even in a 'pops' concert.

Schnittke could at times display a disarmingly fetching sense of lyricism as in these excerpts from Alexander Zarkhy's film The Story of an Unknown Actor. The score has the feel of "updated" Rachmaninoff, with plenty of friendly melodiousness that only a grump could hate. Hints of the more familiar Schnittke creep over like in the seventh cue with its menacing harpsichord ostinato and tense string tremolos. Admirers of the Russian romantics may want to give this score a try if they're thinking of dipping their toes into Schnittke's music.

Sport, Sport, Sport is a documentary film by the great Elem Klimov about the mob mentality and illusion of competitiveness in the field of sports. If Schnittke's music is anything to go by, it must be some documentary. The score begins with an energetic, Olympian fanfare that immediately segues into an ugly swamp of tone clusters from which fragments of the film's themes emerge like monsters trapped in tar. The next cue, Fans, is a mock baroque fugue arranged in cocktail lounge style complete with sizzling cymbals and sleazy saxophone. The work's finale is a grandly tragic musical panorama that has some melodic kinship with the next work on this album, the score to Klimov's Agony.

Agony is about Rasputin, especially his hold over the Tsar's policies and his subsequent murder. The work begins with murmurings from the synthesizer and electronically processed wailing. Very eerie. The next track which accompanies a flashback to the January 9th uprising, scampers along with another harpsichord ostinato reminiscent of Danny Elfman's work. The Waltz which follows is a truly frightening danse macabre with very wide interval leaps and punctured by sforzandi trumpet tone clusters. It dances along beginning with quiet menace until it reaches a whirling climax only to recede back into the shadows from which it came. The closing two numbers may be recognizable to those who are familiar with Schnittke's work. A mournful chorale theme that is later used in the Second Cello Concerto makes it appearance here and closes off these excerpts in with appropriate grimness.

The creation of the pithy Music for an Imaginary Play came about through the work of Schnittke's friend, the theater director Yuri Lyubimov. Lyubimov had planned a theatrical adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Demons and had asked Schnittke to write the incidental music. Schnittke had begun writing the music when Lyubimov defected to the west in 1985. Schnittke (with help from Gennady Rozhdestvensky) decided to salvage some of the music he had written and cobbled together this suite. The instrumentation is very unusual: 3 flutes, trumpet, harmonica, guitar, piano, drum kit, and a choir of three producing a wordless vocalise of great "pathos" through combs and tissue. Schnittke devised an orchestration where he used what he called the "leftovers" from a theater orchestra. The opening Winter Road--seemingly equal parts Weill, Shostakovich, and Mr. Bungle, but pure Schnittke--is an off kilter polka trapped into repeating its manic little theme over and over again with increasing vehemence until a violent thud on the piano calls the dance to a close. A Wending Melody offers a brief interlude of respite with a haunting folk-like melody played in canon on the flutes and the creepy tolling of bells in the background. A brazen March concludes the suite and album with the kind of noise making a group of rowdy drunks would make as they wound their way through the streets after the bar closed.

Schnittke had quite a melodic gift and his biting sense of humor rivalled Shostakovich's. For those of you who imagine Schnittke to be only doom and gloom, give this album a try.