Reviews
Review Search
None of the music ... gets the spine tingling as much as the Schnittke choral music sung by the Holst Singers, conducted by Stephen Layton, on Hyperion CDA 67297. Minnesang, from 1981, features 52 voices surging ecstatically through medieval German love songs. In the 40-minute Concerto for Mixed Chorus, from the mid 1980s, Schnittke adopts the hieratic manner of the Russian Orthodox church: music...
From its very opening the Choir Concerto proclaims its affiliations to the Russian choral tradition. Completed in 1985, it is one of the most imposing of all Schnittke's later works - 40 minutes long, and setting passages from an Armenian book of lamentation - using a language that makes constant reference to the melodic shapes and diatonic harmony of the Orthodox liturgy. This superbly performed...
Although technically the Holst Singers are amateurs, it would be wrong to think they were in any way second rate. Indeed, they sing Schnittke’s "Choir Concerto" better than did the professional BBC Singers in last year’s Schnittke festival at the Barbican.
The professionals are adept at getting by on fewer rehearsals. The Holst Singers work at a piece until they have perfected it, all for the...
A superb and revealing performance of one of Schnittke’s most approachable works
The rather anodyne name Concerto for Mixed Chorus, intended to convey a conscious link to similarly named works by Bortnyansky and other composers, actually conceals a work with tremendous depths of faith and feeling, and a masterpiece of choral writing building firmly on the Russian sacred tradition. The text comes...
The death of Alfred Schnittke in 1998 robbed the world of one of its most distinctive symphonists. But as this fine disc of his lesser-known choral works makes clear, it also deprived Russia of a composer deeply aware of his country's vocal traditions, and a writer able to reflect that tradition through a uniquely personal prism.
By far the most powerful expression of that ability is the mighty...
If in some of his choral music Schnittke sounds a little ‘unlike himself’, this disc reveals a less theatrical, more introspective side to his character. Perhaps it’s that the influences sit contentedly together – Rachmaninov is here, as is Poulenc at times, and the world of Pärt and Tavener isn’t too distant – yet Schnittke’s preoccupation with unusual choral textures makes the works very...