Concerto for piano four hands and chamber orchestra
Hommage ā Grieg for solo violin and orchestra
Polyphonic Tango for ensemble

Combined with:
Martinu: Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1942)

Radio-Philharmonie Hannover des NDR
Eiji Oue (conductor)
Piano Duo Genova and Dimitrov

CPO 999 804-2

Recording in Hannover in 2001

Devotees of Martinu and Schnittke will want to track down this disc. Although of shortish playing duration and with a superficially diffuse and unfocused programme there is quite a bit going for it.

The three movement Martinu work is a legacy of his American wartime years when five symphonies tumbled out in the joyous torrential spate. Those works are irradiated by the dynamics of a scarcely containable excitement typified by the plangent the Fourth Symphony (which I still count the best of the six). The first movement surges with Martinu's usual undampened melodic energy. The ten minute middle-movement adagio only gradually declares itself as by Martinu’s hand. Play its first 3 or 4 minutes, sight unseen, to most listeners and I doubt that many will plump for Martinu. At the core of the movement is a filigree of waves and arpeggiated motion (at times redolent of Nancarrow's studies for player piano) that represents the familiar though still strange Martinu. The chirpy finale is busy and bubbly with one surreal episode at 4.09 which reminded me of the dreamlike stasis of his opera Julietta.

Schnittke's concerto turns its face from such joy. He seems to be exploring danker regions and unwelcoming depths. The horror of life and its dark other half are what Schnittke seems to aim at though he also surprises with innocence and calm as at 3.02. Anger, slow moving kaleidoscopic metamorphosis, martellato violence (8.02), phantasmal realms as far removed from Martinu's sunlight as you can go. Scrambling for parallels the closest I can achieve is to pick up Martinu's Concerto for strings, piano and timpani - a work that looked forward towards Second World War. There worlds are ground to dust or hymned in sorrow much as the famous Bruno Walter Mahler 9 (only recently reissued by Naxos Historical) recorded in Vienna in 1938 did and does.

The other two very short works are first a pastiche Grieg experiment founded on ballet music Schnittke had written for a Gynt ballet in 1986 (and recently toured through the German länder). The solo violin (played by Kathrin Rabus) seems to hold up a skeletal hand and usher us towards a much more equivocal harmonic destination: part Schnittke-like putrescence and part nostalgic Tchaikovsky. The Tango is part of a composite work written in 1979 for Rozhdestvensky. The other movements were by Denisov, Pärt and the conductor himself. This is a fascinating piece which drifts from Bach to Weill in tango mode. It is still within hailing distance of the super-neo-Baroque works Schnittke wrote for Gidon Kremer and which in the 1970s made his name in the West.

By the way the duo are Aglika Genova and Liuben Dimitrova. They have collaborated in this form since 1995. They performed at the 2002 Olympic Games ceremony at Salt Lake City.

Intriguing to see Oue spreading his wings beyond the confines of Reference Recordings and his Minnesota Orchestra.

Thorough notes which lavish much reflection and philosophical musing on Schnittke. A pity that there was not more historical background on the Martinu work.

Lively recording. Strong performances. If the repertoire appeals there is no reason to wait.

Rob Barnett
MusicWeb, August 2002

Despite the poor choice of couplings, this disc contains outstanding performances of both major works. The Clinton-Narboni Duo on Elan recently set the standard in Martinu's wonderful Concerto for Two Pianos, but this performance is every bit as good, and happily quite different. Rather than the chamber orchestra featured on Elan, Genova and Dimitrov enjoy the backing of a full ensemble, and what they sacrifice in the finer points of harmonic detail (evident, for example, at the opening of the finale) they more than make up for in sheer adrenalin. The very natural balances also pay major dividends in the atmospheric textures of the long central slow movement. Anyone who loves this work, a genuine masterpiece in Martinu's late style (dating from the same period as the six symphonies), will want to hear both recordings.

Schnittke's Concerto for Piano four-hands and Chamber Orchestra sits uneasily beside the Martinu, which really is a much better piece all around. Without getting judgmental about the differences in stylistic orientation, Schnittke's stream-of-consciousness collage approach to matters of form in this 20-minute, single-movement work sounds shapeless and disorganized following Martinu's tightly structured and inventive pattern-making. Simple harmonies and tunes, seemingly tossed at random into a dissonant pot, crash into chaotic episodes of raucous noise, punctuated by the recurring sounds of deep bells ā la the finale of Mahler's Sixth. There's one particularly effective climax at the concerto's center, in which the pianists attack a dissonant version of something that suspiciously recalls the final section of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue; but the piece ends, as do so many of this composer's late works, in a fog of black nothingness, its ultimate effect just plain depressing.

I happened to be present at the premiere of Hommage ā Grieg in Bergen, Norway in the early 1990s. Schnittke, already terribly ill from several major heart attacks, was in the audience as well, looking very sad and very sick. He received a generous ovation, and rightly so, but the work itself is a sweet, sad, five-minute piece of fluff that singularly fails to evoke Grieg in any special way (despite the obvious reference to the first bars of Solveig's Song from Peer Gynt at the very opening). Polyphonic Tango, however, though even shorter than the Hommage, has far more fire in its belly, and of all the works here reveals this composer at his considerable best: grim, funny, sonically inventive, and full of surprises. Schnittke always makes good musical points in tango rhythm. As mentioned above, the performances are excellent in every way, and superbly recorded. This disc doesn't really "work" as a whole, but taken individually it's got some terrific parts.

David Hurwitz
Classics Today, 2004