"There is no having, only a being, only a state of being that craves the last breath, craves suffocation."—Franz Kafka

What do tones actually "have"? Do what do they connect—how deep do they go? When one plays a single note, what else is sounding, either sensually or silently, in physical, conceptual, or emotional terms? Alfred Schnittke's last works, difficult knots of expression that they are, tend to force these questions upon us in almost confrontational ways. The music's often barely there, whittled and withered to the point of absence; what is there is apt to be so stark and implacable that it deprives us of most of the qualities we tend to demand of "art"—the transcendent, the beautiful, the magical. Instead, looking at a page from the Second Cello Sonata, one of Schnittke's last completed works, we may see only the matte, unreverberant underside of expression, verging on the inanimate.

That's why we have performers and scholars like Alexander Ivashkin, the first cellist to record Schnittke's sonata, and one of only a handful of artists with enough insight and dark imagination into the composer's music to perform his late works correctly. "The number of notes is small," writes Ivashkin in his notes to recording, "but the meaning, the specific gravity of each of them, is enormous." And indeed, Ivashkin's performance of the five-movement Second Sonata is revelatory: the notes amplify, hypertrophy; they invert their own function, from being the objects sounded in an open space, into the spaces themselves, the vessels or passages through which some dark and heavy body passes, in this case the inscrutably black vocalizing consciousness of Schnittke's late recitative. This is music whose resignation can't merely be taken on faith; the enormous emotional and technical burden which it wants to release from its back must be made sensate by the performer, and that Ivashkin and pianist Irina Schnittke—the late composer's wife—do. In the process, they sound out a music like Kafka's "state of being," a song which, being intoned, "craves the last breath."

After a remarkably simply opening cello recitative, in which the piano basically plays single-note drone at the piano's lowest register, the extraordinary beginning of the second-movement Allegro jolts us into a new visionary world, contrasting the cello's dervish-like passage through octaves over the cello's entire range; things spin out of control, however, and soon the cello is scrappily fighting for its life in a destabilized chromatic vortex. The following Largo is characteristically confessional and prosaic, its heart revealing that omnipresent cipher of Schnittke's late language, the chain of fourths. After a bitter, tragically foundering Allegro, the supernatural last movement offers up an essay in tone-transmutation: here all motion digs into a non-Euclidean time-zone, each pitch is a broadly born-out cosmos, and the searching performance carries the interior intensity of a séance, still seeking the ghost as its last note expires. Perhaps ending entails escape; Kafka also remarked that "only here is suffering suffering."

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