Alfred Schnittke - Piano Quintet V

Piano Quintet (1972 -1976) I. Moderato II. In Tempo di Valse III. Andante IV. Lento V. Moderato Pastorale Irina Scnittke, piano Mark Lubotsky, violin Dimity Hall, violin Irina Morozova, viola Julian Smiles, cello Alfred Schnittke’s Piano Quintet is a dark and heavy planet. Even in the midst of his bewilderingly prolific output, this extremely personal work commands a massive gravity; it seems to orient, arrange, and set in motion so many of Schnittke’s works, before and after. If one wants to find the founding trauma for such a consistently agonizing body of artistic work, it can be found in the Piano Quintet. This centrality may owe much to the quintet’s function: conceived as a memorial to the composer’s mother, who died of a stroke in September 1972, here’s a composition whose substance was drawn from a real event, powerfully tangible and irrevocable. This kind of reality had not been Schnittke’s basis for previous works. His Symp