Marginalia quasi una Fantasia: on the Second Violin Sonata by Alfred Schnittke

The Second Violin Sonata for violin and piano (1968), subtided Quasi una Sonata, is one of Alfred Schnittke's most popular works, and it is one of my personal favourites among his pieces (alongside his First Symphony, First String Quartet, First Hymn, Second and Third Violin Concerti, Three Madrigals, etc). I discovered Schnittke's music in April 1969 at an underground concert given in the Gnessin Institute in Moscow by Alexei Lyubimov (piano), Boris Berman (piano), Lev Mikhailov (clarinet) and a few string players. This half-forbidden concert, organized by Alexander Ivashkin, was all that remained of a whole festival, which had been cancelled at the last moment by the authorities. The concert was split into three parts, the first two of them dedicated to the music of the Soviet avant-garde, with compositions by the likes of Edison Denisov, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov, Viktor Ekimovsky and Kuldar Sink etc. At the end of the second part there was a perfonnance of Schnittke's Serenade for five musicians. This very cheerful and fanny piece, entangled with hundreds of short quotations, sounded very different from the rest of the program. The final part of the concert contained works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, played for the first time in Brezhnev's Soviet Union.