Alfred Schnittke

Mstislav Rostropovich was born on 27th March 1927 and died from cancer a month after his 80th birthday. Whereas Pablo Casals was the leading cellist of the first half of the 20th century, Rostropovich took on this mantle for the second half. He was more than just a cellist however as he conducted and was an excellent piano accompanist to his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. He also became a leading citizen of the world by his support for the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then stripped of his Russian citizenship by the Communists after being granted a visa to work abroad in 1974 and flying back to assist Boris Yeltsin when the new Parliament was besieged by Communist renegades in 1991.

This collection brings together all the recordings with cello that he made for EMI Classics including both versions of the Brahms Double Concerto made with Oistrakh and Szell in 1969 and Perlman and Haitink in 1979; the Dvorák Concerto with Boult in 1957 and Giulini in 1977 and Saint-Saëns Concerto No. 1 with Sargent in 1956 and Giulini in 1977; the Bach Cello Suites both on CD and DVD and the 13CDs of recordings which Rostropovich brought to EMI entitled “The Russian Years”.

Such was his enthusiasm and remarkable playing he inspired numerous composers to write for him. He always expressed his view that the greatest were Sergei Prokofiev, who died on the same day as Stalin, 5th March 1953, Dmitri Shostakovich, died on 9th August 1975 and Benjamin Britten, died on 4th December 1976. Both Rostropovich and Shostakovich had lost their fathers whilst teenagers so when Shostakovich became his teacher he was more of a surrogate father and you may imagine his anguish at not being able to return to Moscow for the funeral (having been stripped of his citizenship); it was thus at Britten’s funeral service that he could give vent to his sadness at the loss of both great friends.

Slava, as he was universally known by his countless friends and colleagues, has left the world a matchless recorded legacy of his genius.

We should all listen and be grateful.

At no time in its long history did European music go through a period of such revolution and diversification as in the 20th Century.

Wagner had transformed music in the 19th century to the extent that every composer coming after had to acknowledge his existence, to a lesser or greater extent.

The advent of the new century saw a great flourishing of compositional styles and techniques that were largely the direct result of Wagner's influence.

Not only that, the new century was to be one of great technological advance and invention. The gramophone and, later, the spread of radio, brought about massive changes in the way that ordinary people accessed and perceived music. Suddenly a whole new world of serious music was to open up to an audience that had hitherto been excluded from what had previously been, albeit unintentionally, an elitist art form.

The works in this set of 16 CDs have been arranged in strict chronological order of composition and the first disc begins with a work from 1901 that has become one of the most popular works in the classical repertoire, mainly through it's use in another great 20th-century art form – the film: Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto.

Thereafter each disc in the set takes the listener on a fascinating journey through the century, composer by composer and work by work, from Russian Romanticism, French Impressionism, English Pastoralism, Atonalism, Neo Classicism right up to Post Modernism, and from as wide a range of countries and genres as possible.

Rising star of the viola, the exciting French player Antoine Tamestit, makes his second disc for Ambroisie/Naďve, with a pairing of two of the most significant works written for the instrument during the second half of the 20th century, Schnittke’s Viola Concerto and Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata. It’s the second of three recordings Tamestit is making, with support from the Borletti Buitoni Trust, in which he aims to explore a wide range of work written and arranged for solo viola. His first recording last year coupled Bach and Ligeti (Chaconne - AM111) and attracted high praise.

Alfred Schnittke wrote his Viola Concerto in 1985, the year that Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, ended the Cold War and allowed Russians once again to enjoy the excitement of travel. The work was commissioned by the Russian violist Yuri Bashmet who gave the first performance a year later at the Royal Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. Ten years earlier in 1975 Dmitri Shostakovich knew he was dying when he wrote the Viola Sonata Op147 and that it would be his last work. Sadly Shostakovich did not live to hear his swansong in concert, but the dedicatee Fyodor Druzhinin performed it informally at Shostakovich’s house on what would have been the composer’s 69th birthday, 26 September.

Antoine Tamestit himself became enamoured of the rich, low tone of the viola as a ten-year-old. He found that the open C string, the same C with which both Schnittke’s Concerto and Shostakovich’s Sonata end, resonated warmly through his entire body and that with the end-button resting against his throat, he could feel the vibrations of the instrument as an extra voice.

Born in Paris to a schoolteacher mother and a composer father, Antoine Tamestit studied the viola with Jean Sulem at the Paris Conservatoire, in the United States with Jesse Levine and the Tokyo Quartet, and in Germany with the great Tabea Zimmermann. First prizes in the major viola competitions in Paris, New York and Munich (where he astounded the judges by playing the Schnittke Concerto from memory) demonstrated his brilliance, since when he’s been a soloist with many leading orchestras, among them the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the BBC Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. He won the 2008 Credit Suisse award which brought him a Lucerne Festival concert with the Vienna Philharmonic and Riccardo Muti. Passionate about chamber music, he performs regularly with artists like Gidon Kremer, Emmanuel Pahud, Mischa Maisky and in trio with Frank Peter Zimmermann and Christian Poltéra. He is well-known in Britain from his period (2004-05) as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and he appears at the Wigmore Hall this autumn in two concerts (26 & 27 October) with Nicholas Angelich, Renaud and Gautier Capuçon.