The story of Alfred Schnittke's final composition — presented here as the premiere recording of his Ninth Symphony — is not without its classical intrigue. The image of a dying composer, battling poor health to allow his shaky hand to scribble out his final musical breath, immediately brings to mind the image from Amadeus of the great master struggling to finish his own Requiem before his flame was extinguished. It has a tragic romanticism to it, and is compelling as a tale. But is the end product as compelling as the idea of it?
Schnittke's final work was left in a state of a damaged relic, with some sections an almost illegible scrawl. His wife sought out trusted colleagues of her husband to complete his manuscript, finally settling on fellow Russian composer Alexander Raskatov. Raskatov's task was to decipher the score and adjust as needed, in keeping with his intimate knowledge of Schnittke's works and his stylistic development during his later years.
The opening Andante starts early in a polytonal nature, with strings gently wavering between chords and clusters before launching into their rather fractured, and almost pained, journey throughout this movement. There is a restlessness at play here, with sections of subdued melancholic reverie set next to and against passages of discordant outbursts of brass punctuated by percussion. The composer's wife had alluded to the sense that this symphony was done so with his own mortality and exit from this life firmly in mind. It's easy to envision even this isolated movement as developing some of those ideas, mixing aspects of both a peaceful and painful departure.
The Moderato and closing Presto movements seem to swim in much the same waters, but unfortunately with less determinism. Schnittke's famed polystylistic approach could be seen to apply as much to his structure of symphonic form as it does to the execution within sections. The Moderato is cut from the same cloth as the Andante, but neither seems to develop the idea nor support it. The Presto is, predictably, both more lively and steadily paced, but its resolution feels unsatisfying and incomplete. And it may very well be incomplete; we may never know.
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