Alfred Schnittke: Klavierquintett; Shostakovich: Streichquartett Nr. 15, Op. 144 (2003)

About this title: Joining together Schnittke's piano quintet with Shostakovich's last string quartet on a single disc was inspired. Both works were composed in the mid-'70s in the U.S.S.R., but more importantly, both works are intimately concerned with dying and death: Schnittke wrote his piano quintet on the death of his mother and Shostakovich wrote his last string quartet the summer before he himself died. But while the works have many things in common -- a tonal language that moves freely from consonance to dissonance and an emotional ... read more

Tracks on this album

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