18 — Friday, July 24, 1998 — North Shore News

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> Fronos Quartet performs Alfred Schnittke > 5440 — Since When > Othar Turner — Everybody Hollerin’ Goat

BB t44%% Kronos Quartet performs Alfred Schnittke —The Complete String Quartets, Nonesuch (79500-2) 1998.

@ The films of Andrei Tarkovsky at the Pacific Cinematheque:

The Mirror (1974) at 7:15 and Stalker (1979) at 9:15 are scheduled for tonight, Saturday & Sunday.

While the idea of absolute power is enough to strike fear into the body politic the actual day-to-day exercising of force is much more mundane.

Avant-garde composer Alfred Schnittke (born 1934) has spent the greater part of his creative lite combat- ting the trivial whims of petty bureau- crats.

{n the former Sovict Union where one needed permission to do anything the most effective way of maintaining control was to deny everything. “Whenever performers included Schnittke’s work in their repertoire, they could expect many problems,” says Solomon Volkov, in the liner notes to the new Kronos Quartet CD of his four string quartets. “Frequently performances of Schnittke’s works were cancelled at the last minute by orders from ‘above’... The authorities also routinely attempted to sabotage his foreign commissions. When that failed, the cultural bureaucrats would forbid Schnittke to attend the premieres abroad.”

Despite these obstacles the innovative composer managed to produce a large catalogue of work in Moscow and contin- ues to write music in Hamburg although he has suffered sev- am strokes since establishing residence there in the carly

s.

Kronos’ recordings of the four string quartets provide an excellent introduction to his work as they come from various .periods of his career. .

The first from 1966 is Schnittke’s “avant-garde manifesto” claims Volkov. It is a declaration of independence and not a

THIS WEEK EDITOR

t FRED Schnittke’s First String Quartet (1966) is ais avant-garde manifesto.

great way for the voung composer co ingratiate him- self with the party faithful.

The serial picce was writ- ten a vear after his mysticism for moderns Variations on One Chord (for piano) and further aligned his name with all things “anti-Soviet”. Between the first two quar- tets Schnittke composed the elegiag Canon In Memory of I. Seravinsky.

The Second String Quartet (1980) is dedicated to the late filmmaker Larissa Shepitko who died ina car accident at the age of 41. Schnittke wrote the scores for two of her films. The piece shifts away from the angular twelve-tone row con- ceptualization of his earlier work toward more Ivrical structures.

The reassessment of Western music continues in . the Third String Quartet (1983) from what Volkov call: Schnittke’s “polystylistic period”. Listencrs will hear echoes of Beethoven, di Lasso, Shostakovich and Wagner in the - Kronos performance first recorded in 1987.

The Fourth String Quartet (1989), commissioned by the Alban Berg Quartet, takes things full-circle with the Russian intellectual again exploring the serial style of the second Viennese school.

The Kronos Quartet reads an intense spirituality into the work of Schnittke and emphasize this aspect in the coda Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief taken: from Concerto for Mixed Choir.

In the quest for a specifically Russian spiritual experience Schnittke shares similarities witis the late fimmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) whose works are currently on view at Vancouver's Pacific Cinematheque.

“The Seven Feature Films of Andrei Tarkovsky” summer series continues this weekend with screenings of the autobio-

raphical The Mirsar (1974) and Stalker (1979) the iast film Fe completed in the Soviet Union. The story line of the latter work is in the science-fiction

* “Photo Betty Freeman

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FABULOUS GR00M AKEOVER OMT |

THE members of northern California’s Kronos Quartet are David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Joan Jeanrenaud.

genre as arc his films Solaris and The Sacrifice. The Mirror appears to come from another consciousness altogether as it poetically examines the lives of three generations of his family.

Tarkovsky defected to the West with his wife Larissa while making Nostalghia (1983) in Italy. He spent the last years of © his life trying unsuccessfully to convince the Soviet authorities to release his son Andriuschka who had been left bebind.

The director described his last film Sacrifice (1984) as a meditation “on the absence in our culture of room for spiri- tual experience.” He shot the film in Sweden with several members of Ingmar Bergman’s regular ensemble. Nostalghia (1983) at 7:15 p.m. and The Sacrifice (1986) at 9:35 p.m. will conclude the series as a double bill at the cinematheque on the August long weekend July 31, August land 2. | “For his autobiographical film, The Mirror, Tarkovsky recon- structed his grandmother’s wooden dacha, and even went so far as to plant the neighboring field in buckwheat, waiting a year for the grain to ripen in order to recreate the landscape as he remembered it.? — Stuart C. Hancock, Mars Hill Review. .

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