Requiring a highly virtuoso solo player, this is a striking single-movement chamber concerto in a strong post-War modernist style. It exists in versions for cello or trombone solo.

Despite the official opposition of the Soviet authorities to twelve-tone and other "advanced" techniques of the time, Alfred Schnittke was developing just such an idiom for himself during the 1960s. He was able to support himself by writing numerous film scores and teaching. For his film scores, of course, he dropped back into the approved post-Romantic style he had been taught at the official State Conservatories.

Thus this work is in a full-blown atonal idiom. The performances it received were mainly private or semi-private affairs and could conveniently be overlooked by officialdom. After three or four more years of jumping between his "for hire" music's approved style and his other music's modern style, Schnittke realized that he could make the same sort of jump in his "serious" music, so rather than being always a "modernist," he became a "polystylist," now writing a piece in classical harmonies, next writing a piece in advanced tonal style, and again writing a piece in the Vienna-oriented style of this work. Eventually he found ways to mix all these styles in single pieces for particularly intriguing effects.

But this work shows that he could sustain interest and a musical logic that is not difficult for a classical audience to grasp. It is a 12-minute work in a single movement, for cello solo, flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, percussion, and piano. The soloist speaks in a parlando (as if talking) mode throughout, engaging in conversation with individual instruments in the chamber group, or with groups of them, or with the whole group. The conversation takes on various moods and tones, as a free-flowing group will tend to do, humorous, serious, light-hearted, and angry.

Although the work received a few performances, it was rare for cellists to take it up. They told the composer that their part was just too difficult. Part of the problem was in keeping up a forceful-enough tone to dominate the conversation, as the cello part was supposed to do, against a group of instruments that all speak in a brighter, more projecting tone than the cello naturally does.

In the 1980s Schnittke began receiving a series of recordings from the Swedish record firm BIS. Visiting their studios he met their young star trombonist, Christian Lindberg, having just heard one of Lindberg's concerto discs. Lindberg asked Schnittke if he could write a new trombone piece for him. Schnittke told him about this piece and said he had been imagining that if a trombone could play it, the work's balance problem might be solved.

He sent Lindberg a score. The trombonist decided that the work, although still very difficult, could be arranged for his instrument, and the two worked together to create an alternate version. Lindberg premiered it at a special Schnittke Festival in Stockholm, to the composer's heartfelt approval.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide