Okay, sure, why not? If he calls it a Concerto Grosso then it must be a Concerto Grosso, right? But even if it is a four-movement work that occasionally adheres to the rules of soloists and ripieno, and even if passages in it are as luminously beautiful as anything written anytime in the tragic twentieth century, Alfred Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No. 2 is still willfully nihilistic in its treatment of the music. Schnittke drives spikes of dissonance through the body of the music and inserts slices of a random arrhythmic ...
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Okay, sure, why not? If he calls it a Concerto Grosso then it must be a Concerto Grosso, right? But even if it is a four-movement work that occasionally adheres to the rules of soloists and ripieno, and even if passages in it are as luminously beautiful as anything written anytime in the tragic twentieth century, Alfred Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No. 2 is still willfully nihilistic in its treatment of the music. Schnittke drives spikes of dissonance through the body of the music and inserts slices of a random arrhythmic electric guitar and the scattered clatter of a demented harpsichord. That the soloists -- muscular violinist Oleg Kagan and soulful cellist Natalia Gutman -- can take this claptrap seriously is a testimony to their professionalism. That conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky can make the whole farrago sound at all persuasive is a testimony to his musicianship.Then there's Schnittke's Viola Concerto, a more or less stylistically cogent and yet infinitely more compelling work. Although clearly...
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