Alfred Schnittke's Second Concerto Grosso is a different creature than his First. While the 1977 Concerto Grosso No. 1 for 2 Violins, Strings and Keyboards is a lithe, vicious, often comical work, the Second, finished five years later, is a weightier affair. The soloists are now violin and cello; the Baroque band is now a full orchestra with electric guitar, drum kit, and brake drum; there are four large movements rather than six smaller ones; the entire work is imbued with an air of sincere tragedy, albeit with mud on its shoes.

Schnittke dedicated the work to its premiere soloists, husband-and-wife duo Oleg Kagan (violin) and Natalia Gutman (cello); famed for their flawless ensemble, the couple inspired in Schnittke a musical air of companionship—a single soul in two instruments. Against this intimate, almost private alliance, Schnittke pits an orchestra of antitheses, opposed to all that the soloists so arduously assert. As duo tethers together in strained lyricism, orchestra mechanically rattles apart; while duo attempts to expand in inward dialogue, orchestra threatens to implode in hollow grandeur; and while duo ever strives toward the sublime, the orchestra vomits out an endless parade of musical banalities—Baroque pastiches, trashy pop, propagandized marches. The Concerto's wonder, however, lies in dissolving such opposites; at its peak moments, the Second Concerto Grosso free-floats between deep and shallow, wise and stupid, and at those moments it achieves that strange greatness so closely connected to Mahler and Berg, two of Schnittke's avowed models.

The work's opening is exemplary: violin and cello unfold an unaccompanied duet, earnest and eloquent. No sooner is the allusion revealed—to F.X. Gruber's famous Christmas carol, Silent Night—than the orchestra sounds its alarm-bell entrance with another half-allusion, this time to J.S. Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto. The faux-carol suffers a decidedly un-Yuletide angst, while the faux-Bach that follows barely convinces with its Technicolor pomp; both sides collapse under the entrance of a cheap pop band blaring American rock. The first movement thus continues its cavalcade of dysfunctional personalities, but eventually does itself in with a nasty return of the fake-Bach ritornello, ending in the "wrong" key.

The ensuing second movement is the emotional heart of the work—a wounded attempt at a Baroque passacaglia. Over a repeating bass pattern, the duo unravels a delicate, pathetic hymn, possibly of Jewish origin. As the hymn continues, the orchestra at first mimics, than mocks, than brutally assaults the duo. It is one of the more extraordinary passages in Schnittke; waltz bands, military bands, funk bands—all musical mobs crushing the individual.

When the movement finally breaks, the duo is left floating in the stratosphere, the orchestra smoldering to silence down below. A fairy-tale trap door opens up, however, and soon the music takes off again, led by the Brandenburg theme on three flutes. What was in the First Concerto Grosso only a small postlude now becomes an entire landscape, infused with deep, almost nostalgic melancholy. The Silent Night theme finally unfurls at length, interrupted only once by the orchestra. Otherwise, the duo here "weeps its fill," all the while drawing the edge of space and sound. This "cosmic music" is very close to Schnittke—an always futile attempt to represent the unrepresentable, the inaudible tones of the other world. And as in many Schnittke works, that world only begins to reveal itself in a sort of post-music, after everything else has blighted away.



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