As so many recordings already exist, best to begin with professions of contentment. These performances are as plummily histrionic as one could ask. (That's no sly snipe. The music demands it.) And the sound, moreover, is first-class, thanks to recordist Jonathan Wyner. So let's dispose of a solo gripe: Suite in Old Style of 1972 (Pastorale, Ballet, Minuet, Fugue, Pantomime) is a featherweight pastiche unworthy of this company. It may have worked nicely in the film for which Schnittke wrote it, but as a stand-alone, not. (Nineteen years on, the composer adapted his serio-mischievous Quasi una sonata of 1968, for violin and piano - the original version of which we hear on the present disc - to a work for violin and chamber orchestra with piano. See Sony Classical SK 53271, with Mark Lubotsky, violin; Rostropovich, cello; Irina Schnittke, piano; the English Chamber Orchestra, Rostropovich conducting, and Deutsche Grammophon 429 413-2, with Gidon Kremer, violin; Yuri Smirnov, piano; and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Heinrich Schiff conducting. Both performances are excellent. I prefer the DG for its knife-edge abandon.) The four-movement Violin Sonata No. 1 of 1963 sounds at the hands of its present executants a powerful exemplar of Russian Romanticism, despite foreshadowings of Schnittke's slippery-slope mannerisms. Annotator David Zacks describes the program's recentmost work, A Paganini, for solo violin (1982), as a "great example of Schnittke's polystylistic[s]." I can only think to add, "and gallows-humorist tendencies." Does any living composer's oeuvre serenade the Crack of Doom in quite so madcap a manner?

The notes provide Gradov and Heifitz's not inconsiderable bios. Enough to say that as a duo they play as an idiomatically pungent entity. A very attractive release.

Mike Silverton
Fanfare, January/February 1998