Sporadic aggressive bravos and mild applause greet this performance of Schnittke’s First Symphony, given in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 1988. Which seems about right. The bravos salute the courage it took to produce such an iconoclastic piece from the depths of Brezhnevian stagnation around 1970, and all that meant to Russian composers at the time. The muted applause reflects the obvious fact that the symphony’s intrinsic merits are slight, plus perhaps the realization that its symbolic value as a kind of musical dissidence was nullified by the freedoms instituted under Gorbachov. It had already become non-contemporary, in other words. The composer Viktor Suslin once called this gallimaufry of quotation, pastiche and style-shuffling The Gulag Archipelago of music. Point taken; but now it comes across more as a colossal temper tantrum.
That does not prevent Rozhdestvensky from motivating his orchestra to a performance of considerably more immediacy than Segerstam’s Stockholmers (who were no shrinking violets themselves). That’s hardly surprising, given Rozhdestvensky’s involvement with the work – as dedicatee and as the man responsible for the rewrite of its conclusion, for its notorious premiere in Gorky and for its first recording on Melodiya (never made widely available).
As with that Melodiya version, the recording quality on the new disc makes up in directness and impact what it loses to BIS in warmth and clarity. At times I fancy we can hear the audience discussing the show – a not inappropriate addition, given the deliberately provocative nature of Schnittke’s collage techniques. The main point is that coarseness and blatancy are the manner to which interpretations of this symphony need to be born, and this is what the new issue offers.'