Since Alfred Schnittke died in 1998 there seems to have been a certain winding-down of interest in his music (the same might be said of another composer who died that same year, Michael Tippett). The pair of works on this CD underline both the memorable and the problematic aspects of Schnittke’s achievement. Neither is comfortable listening, and with neither is indifference an option.

The Concerto Grosso No 2 (1982) is a large-scale instance of the modern doctrine that Baroque music is both unforgettable and intolerable. The first three movements trace explosive encounters with hallowed traditions, embroiling Schnittke’s favoured icon of unknowing innocence, Silent Night. This is the music of a composer who has scored so many films that he can no longer distinguish slapstick comedy from gory horror. Maybe the more melodramatic outbursts of anguish seem to interrupt the music rather than continue it. Yet it remains an enormously energetic and gripping affair, and even the finale, in danger of becoming becalmed as it searches for an eloquence no less urgent than the turbulence that has come earlier, is far from redundant.

Ten years on, in the Symphony No 6, the energy has drained away, as Schnittke seems to ask whether any kind of defiance can survive the insidious influx of defeatism and despair. There are places in each of the four movements where this drift into the dark is resisted, but not for long. For some it is all too impersonal to be moving, yet Valéry Polansky skilfully focuses those brief moments of outward-reaching emotion with appropriate starkness. He is helped by a recording, made in Moscow with Russian technicians, in which the sound is noticeably but appropriately confined, the weight of even the sparest textures unapologetically substantial. With two fine soloists in the Concerto Grosso, this is a must for collectors of Chandos’s Schnittke series, and a welcome reminder of one of the later 20th-century’s most distinctive and troubling musical voices.