Alfred Schnittke’s music for these four films sounds just like Schnittke–big surprise. Leaving out his late works, most of which are just plain miserable, his eclectic poly-stylistic mode of composition makes him a “natural” composer for the cinema, and all four of the suites on display here show him in vintage form. There are those wonderful pastiche pieces of fake “classical” music, several tangos, foxtrots, and the like, all fertilized by Schnittke’s slightly twisted way of looking at such things, and there’s plenty of very creepy mood music. He gets tremendous mileage from simple effects: the sound of the harpsichord in unexpected places, sparing touches of percussion, persistent rhythmic ostinatos, snatches of popular tunes (there’s a particularly pungent setting of the Marseillaise here), and the eerie wordless chorus in My Past and Thoughts.
The most remarkable thing about all of this music is its economy and sureness of touch: there’s not a note too much. Every mood expresses itself immediately, with no preliminaries. If I haven’t gone into the specifics of the four suites that extensively, it’s because they have so much in common with each other, and sound so typical of what we already know of the composer, that they are really best considered together. Frank Strobel leads the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with a sure hand, and he’s very atmospherically recorded too. This is a major addition to the discography of a very remarkable composer, and great fun. Don’t miss it.
