Raul Mikson (tenor), Maria Melaha (soprano), Karolina Kriis (soprano), Marianne Pärna (alto), Ave Hännikäinen (alto), Toomas Tohert (tenor), Kaia Urb (soprano)Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Kaspars Putniņš
BIS · BIS2292 · 59 minutes
Pairing Schnittke and Pärt on one program feels almost inevitable once you hear it — both composers wrestling with silence, faith, and the sacred through such different means, one through dense chromatic anguish, the other through that famous tintinnabuli stillness. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir sings this music like it’s in their bones, which of course it is, and Putniņš draws out a bass sound so grounded and resonant that the quieter passages feel like they’re coming from somewhere underground. There’s a reason this scooped up a Gramophone Award — the sheer control here, the way the choir can shift from a whisper to something overwhelming without ever losing tuning, is the kind of thing you notice more with each listen.
Awards:
- Gramophone Magazine — March 2018 — Editor’s Choice
- Gramophone Awards — 2018 — Winner – Choral
- Presto Recordings of the Year — Finalist 2018
“The performance by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Kaspars Putiniņš is really impressive with a particularly rich and sonorous bass sound that is absolutely tailor- made for this…”
— BBC Music Magazine, November 2018,5 out of 5 stars
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Kaspars Putnins
BIS · BIS2521 · 60 minutes
Schnittke wrote his Choir Concerto as a kind of private prayer, setting the medieval Armenian mystic Grigor Narekatsi’s texts for unaccompanied voices, and the result feels less like a concert piece than something overheard in a candlelit room. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir has this uncanny ability to hold enormous, slow-shifting harmonic clouds together without ever sounding effortful, which matters enormously in music this exposed. Under Kaspars Putniņš they find both the ache and the strange, grainy beauty in Schnittke’s writing, and by the closing movement the sound has a weight that genuinely stops you in your tracks.
Awards:
- Gramophone Magazine — July 2026 — Critics’ Choice 2021
- Diapason d’Or — October 2021 — Nouveauté
- Presto Recordings of the Year — Finalist 2021
- International Classical Music Awards — 2022 — Nominated – Choral
“Even by their standards, the choir are on blindingly good form in Schnittke’s monumental Choir Concerto.”
— Gramophone Magazine, December 2021
Anna Gourari (piano), Orchestra Dell Svizzera Italiana / Markus Poschner
ECM · 4875453 · 79 minutes
Pairing Hindemith and Schnittke on one disc feels almost like eavesdropping on two very different arguments about what the twentieth century did to tonality, and Anna Gourari plays both like she’s genuinely fascinated by the contradictions. Her touch in the Hindemith is crisp and architectural, but she never lets it go dry — there’s real color hiding in those angular lines, and the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana finds it with her. By the time Schnittke’s polystylistic collisions show up, you’re already primed to hear the whole program as one long, strange conversation about memory, irony, and what’s left of Romanticism after everything’s been taken apart.
Awards:
- BBC Music Magazine — September 2024 — Concerto Choice
- Presto Recordings of the Year — Finalists 2024
- International Classical Music Awards — 2025 — Nominated – Assorted Programs
“She extracts a dizzying range of colours from Hindemith’s ingeniously constructed score…The string section of the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana under Markus Poschner responds incisively…”
— BBC Music Magazine, September 2024,5 out of 5 stars
Danish String Quartet
ECM · 4818564 · 76 minutes
The whole idea behind the Prism series is genuinely clever: each disc traces a line from a Bach fugue through Beethoven and into a twentieth-century voice, showing how harmonic ideas refract across centuries like light through glass. Here the Danish String Quartet lands on Schnittke as the modern lens, and the effect is unnerving in the best way — Beethoven’s Op. 127 suddenly sounds haunted by music that hadn’t been written yet. It’s the kind of programming that makes you hear a piece you thought you knew as if for the first time.
Awards:
- BBC Music Magazine — November 2019 — Chamber Choice
- Limelight Magazine Recordings of the Year — 2019 — Nominated – Chamber
- International Classical Music Awards — 2019 — Nominee – Chamber Music
- The New York Times — Recordings of the Year 2019
“A revelatory connected soundscape in which Beethoven’s introspection feels more unsettling than usual.”
— BBC Music Magazine, November 2019
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Vladimir Jurowski
Pentatone · PTC5186485 · 52 minutes
Schnittke wrote his Third Symphony as a sort of guided tour through the entire history of German music, dropping in fragments of Wagner, Bruckner, Hindemith and Bach before scrambling them together into something that feels both reverent and deeply unsettled. Jurowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin don’t try to smooth over that dissonance, they let the collisions land with all their weird, lurching force, which is exactly what a piece this strange needs. Fifty-two minutes of stylistic vertigo that somehow adds up to a coherent, oddly moving whole.
Awards:
- Presto Recordings of the Year — Finalist 2015
“It’s the willingness to embrace [Schnittke’s] eclectic mix that for me is the success of this recording; although frequently baffled and staggered at the constant shifts from one idea to the…”
— Jame Longstaffe, Presto Music, 16th February 2015
Rundfunkchor Berlin, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Frank Strobel
Capriccio · C5350 · 53 minutes
Schnittke wrote so much for the screen that entire decades of his catalogue basically hid in plain sight, scored for movies most listeners never saw and then filed away. Frank Strobel has made something of a specialty out of digging these scores up and giving them full orchestral treatment, and this fifth volume finds the same restless mix of sarcasm, tenderness, and outright dread that makes his concert music so gripping. The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin plays it with total commitment, treating cues that once flickered under dialogue as music that can stand entirely on its own — and the Opus Klassik win says other people heard that too.
Awards:
- Opus Klassik — 2022 — Winner – Film Music
