Between Two Worlds, a two week festival of the works of Alfred Schnittke (1934-89), has been an opportunity to experience what a wonderfully entertaining composer he was. Artistically-directed by ...

Pardon my language but where the heck was everyone? It’s very possible that a potent double-shot of often gloomy Russian composers — i.e. Alfred Schnittke and Dmitri Shostakovich — didn’t mesh with ...

The dissonant oboe suspensions at the start of Bach's St John Passion have a sharp, potent sting here, compelling you to sit up and listen with unusual attentiveness. Released in time for Easter, ...

Composers over the centuries have utilized music written by their predecessors as building blocks in their own works, whether Brahms’s “Variations on a Theme by Haydn,” Mozart’s “Variations on a Theme ...

Some composers get a word or phrase attached to them and it sticks like mud. For the German-Russian Alfred Schnittke (died 1998) it’s “polystylism”, descriptive of a magpie approach that borrows from ...