Schnittke: Concerto for Mixed Chorus; Voices of Nature; Minnesang**
Holst Singers/Stephen Layton
Hyperion CDA67297 [64:48]
The grotesque and the sacred—Schnittke inhabited both territories with equal conviction, though listeners who know only his polystylistic orchestral works, with their gaudy collages and deliberate bad taste, might be startled by the austere devotional intensity of the Concerto for Mixed Chorus. Written in 1984–85, when the composer was supposedly crafting clever postmodern commentaries on musical decay, this forty-minute meditation on texts by the tenth-century Armenian monk Grigor Narekatsi stands as one of the most uncompromising spiritual utterances in twentieth-century music. No irony here. No electric guitars smuggled in to épater les commissars.
The work emerged from that peculiar Soviet phenomenon—artists forbidden explicit religious expression who nevertheless channeled the Orthodox tradition with an urgency that put comfortable Western believers to shame. Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom comes to mind, or the final pages of Chekhov’s “The Student,” where a campfire story about Peter’s denial becomes an epiphany about the connectedness of human suffering across centuries. Schnittke, massively popular in Russia during the glasnost years, seemed to articulate something his countrymen couldn’t quite name—a spiritual hunger that had been denied vocabulary for seventy years.
The concerto’s ten movements unfold in an almost unvarying pianissimo, the modal harmonies shifting with glacial slowness, the textures dense and dark. Some critics have complained about the unchanging dynamic landscape, the relentless inwardness. They’re missing the point. This isn’t music designed to entertain or even to move in conventional ways—it’s contemplative in the most rigorous sense, demanding that listeners abandon expectations of variety or contrast. The Armenian texts, even in translation, possess a stark beauty: pleas for mercy, acknowledgments of unworthiness, cries from the depths. Schnittke’s setting treats them with a kind of reverent simplicity that makes Pärt sound fussy and Tavener positively garrulous.
Stephen Layton and the Holst Singers—a London-based ensemble that operates at a remarkably high level for a non-professional choir—bring a characteristically English coolness to this music. Their sound is beautifully blended, the tuning secure even in Schnittke’s most knotty chromatic passages. Yes, the deep Russian bass sonority of Svetlanov’s premiere recording on Chandos remains incomparable, that particular chest resonance that seems to rise from the earth itself. And yes, one suspects the Russian pronunciation here isn’t always idiomatic—certain vowels sound a bit too rounded, the hard consonants not quite percussive enough. But in music this densely woven, where individual words often dissolve into pure phonetic texture, these are venial sins.
What Layton and his singers capture superbly is the architecture of the piece, the way each movement builds from near-silence to a carefully controlled climax before subsiding again. Listen to how they shape the long crescendo in the fourth movement, “Make me worthy to share,” or the hushed intensity they bring to “Having reflected, I became downcast.” The album, made at All Hallows, Gospel Oak, captures the choir in a warm but not overly reverberant acoustic—you can hear individual voices emerging from the texture without losing the essential corporate sound.
The coupling of Voices of Nature (1972) feels slight—five minutes of wordless vocalise with vibraphone that sounds attractive enough in the moment but evaporates from memory almost immediately. Pleasant sonic wallpaper, nothing more.
Minnesang (1980–81) offers more substance, though it operates in an entirely different aesthetic universe from the concerto. Here Schnittke explores the legacy of medieval German aristocratic song, setting texts phonetically—he claimed the semantic content didn’t interest him, only the sound patterns. The result is a clever exercise in texture-building, with cascading crescendos and intricate contrapuntal games. It’s skillfully done, demonstrating Schnittke’s formidable craft, but it never quite justifies its eighteen-minute duration. One admires the mastery without feeling particularly engaged.
But make no mistake: this disc earns its place in any serious collection for the concerto alone. To hear a composer working under political constraints nevertheless reaching toward transcendence, to witness the Orthodox tradition asserting itself even in the most unpromising circumstances—that’s the real story here. The Holst Singers may not possess the authority of Russian forces steeped in this repertoire from childhood, but they’ve prepared this enormously challenging score with evident dedication and sing it with conviction. In a market crowded with superficial “holy minimalism,” Schnittke’s concerto reminds us what genuine spiritual struggle sounds like. It’s not always pretty. It’s not meant to be.
