Schnittke had an uncanny way with rhetoric—almost a kind of disorder one might venture to say. It was at work in both his music and his words, and almost always had the effect of turning things wildly upside-down: in a flash, the elevated would fall terribly low, or something of gravest seriousness would suddenly crackle into high farce. It could seem as if Schnittke were trying to say the right thing, but his temperature dials were awry: the salads came out hot, the ice-cream was boiling.

Take for instance Schnittke's casual reminiscence of the creation of his ballet from 1971, Labyrinths. The five-movement, 40-minute, formidably involved score (for chamber orchestra) was written at the behest of Russian ballet-master Vladimir Vasiliev, who had grand plans for a large, episodic competition piece of substantial avant-garde metier, eventually for performance at the Bolshoi Theater. Alas, not much came of the ambitious project: the large first movement was performed with little rehearsal time at competition, after which the dance company broke up and Vasiliev, along with his wife and partner went abroad, apparently for good. Schnittke makes light of the fall-through, noting that upon seeing Vasiliev in New York in the early 1990s, the choreographer completely failed to recall the whole endeavor. But Schnittke's take is pricelessly odd, a thick grand-guignol lacquer on an otherwise matte statement of resignation: "Once again the 'corpse of an idea' remained lying in the cellar of oblivion."

The music to the ballet itself is strangely similar in its mixture of the simplistic and dauntingly sophisticated, the naive and the learned, and the funny and scary; indeed, while the score is not one of Schnittke's better known works, Labyrinths does provide a veritable maze of figures, moods, and techniques which would become archetypes in Schnittke's later output. The first movement's carnivalesque haunted house of timbres founds itself on the Schnittke "continuo" group, a pearly amalgam of keyboard instruments (piano, celesta, harpsichord) and percussion instruments (marimba, vibraphone, bells, glockenspiel) which blend into a sonic hall of mirrors. So effective in the score's long and disquietingly atmospheric first movement, these sounds would undergo greater invention in Schnittke's Second and Fourth Symphonies (1979, 1984), and indeed provide the conceptual spine for Schnittke's last great ballet, 1987's Peer Gynt. Here Schnittke realizes he's onto something, and creates a 15-minute last movement whose monolithic progression simply builds upon this unadorned, reverberant sound-world; the climax, resounding rich major thirds, recalls the work's opening gesture, and does so with marvelous equivocality—is this joy? Stricken terror? Again, the rhetoric loopiness maintains a poker-face.

The middle three movements are all inventions and developments of a single mood or process. They are for the most part rapid and scherzo-like accumulations, both on the sonic level (layers of sounds accrue, dynamic and timbral screens grow from transparencies into great blocks), and on level of anxiety—the rhetorical inversion here happens with deft seamlessness, as the playful flies fast into the terrifying.

© Seth Brodsky, All Music Guide