Alfred Schnittke was the most prominent Russian composer of the generation after Shostakovich, and by far the most productive, especially during the decade after Mikhail Gorbachev's arrival in power (1985), when his music seemed to match the rapid pace of events, the surprise, and the sense of history peeling back. There were three operas from him in those years, and four symphonies, not to mention numerous other orchestral and chamber works. Since this was also the period when much of his earlier music reached the west for the first time, the onrush was startling.

Symphony No.1

If one wanted a nickname for Schnittke's First Symphony, which was played for the first time in this country last night, then perhaps it could be ‘The Brezhnev’, the work being vast, immensely powerful but supremely confident, jovial but chillingly mirthless, and only just credible as an example of human behaviour.

It is also, and here perhaps it departs from the late Leonid, a great mass of contradictions and incoherences. We knew already that Schnittke was a master of masked and faked voices, beguiling the ear with tales of long ago and nevermore while furiously shrieking at the same time, asking questions about identity and consciousness that may seem particularly acute in the Soviet Union but are by no means irrelevant elsewhere. The symphony now shows him capable of commanding immense resources over a span of eighty minutes, of creating musical ironies that combine explosive immediacy with a capacity to rumble on.