Since his debut with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in 1981, Roland Pöntinen has performed with major orchestras throughout the world. He has been invited to many prestigious festivals including Schleswig-Holstein, Verbier and Mostly Mozart, and worked with conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and Leif Segerstam.

Highlights include performances with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Scottish Chamber Orchestra as well as appearances at the London Proms. He has recently performed the complete Beethoven sonatas and Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage.

Many composers, among them Sven-Erik Bäck, Veli-Matti Puumala, Anders Eliasson and Anders Hillborg, have dedicated works to him, and in 2007 he gave the world premiere of Rodion Shchedrin’s Romantic Duets together with the composer at the Verbier Festival. As a chamber player Pöntinen has worked with artists such as Janine Jansen, Håkan Hardenberger and Christian Lindberg.

His extensive discography spans over 100 recordings for, among others, BIS, cpo, EMI and his own label Haddock.

Pöntinen is also active as a composer and his latest work, L’heure bleue, dedicated to Christian Lindberg, was premiered in 2021.

Pöntinen is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and in 2002 received the Litteris et Artibus. He has been juror in several international competitions.

For more information, visit www.rolandpontinen.com.

Alfred Schnittke’s work has won wide acceptance in recent years, particularly since political changes in the former Soviet Union. His early studies in Vienna were followed by formal training at the Moscow Conservatory, where he later taught. His musical language is eclectic, combining a number of styles, contemporary and traditional.

Orchestral Music

Orchestral music by Schnittke includes a series of interesting concertos or works for solo instrument and orchestra. These include concertos for violin, for cello, for oboe and harp, for viola and for piano. A series of concerti grossi is of significance, along with the ‘St Florian’ Symphony (the second of eight symphonies) and In memoriam for solo viola and orchestra.

Chamber Music

Schnittke’s chamber music includes string quartets and sonatas for violin and for cello and piano, along with a Sonata in the Olden Style for violin and piano and a Suite in the Old Style for the same instruments. His Piano Quintet shows some of the influence of Shostakovich, and his String Trio, commissioned to mark the centenary of the birth of Alban Berg and the 50th anniversary of his death, reflects diverse Viennese elements.

Dmitry Shostakovich belongs to the generation of Russian composers trained principally after the Communist Revolution of 1917. He graduated from the Petrograd Conservatory as a pianist and composer, his First Symphony winning immediate favour. His subsequent career in Russia varied with the political climate. The initial success of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, based on Leskov and later revised as Katerina Ismailova, was followed by official condemnation, emanating apparently from Stalin himself. The composer’s Fifth Symphony, in 1937, brought partial rehabilitation, while the war years saw a propaganda coup in the Symphony No. 7, ‘Leningrad’, performed in the city under German siege. In 1948 he fell afoul of the official musical establishment with his Ninth Symphony, thought to be frivolous, but he enjoyed the relative freedom following the death of Stalin in 1953. Shostakovich outwardly and inevitably conformed to official policy, but posthumous information suggests that he remained very critical of Stalinist dictates, particularly with regard to music and the arts. He occupies a significant position in the 20th century as a symphonist and as a composer of chamber music, writing in a style that is sometimes spare in texture but always accessible, couched as it is in an extension of traditional tonal musical language.

Stage Works

Katerina Ismailova remains the principal opera of Shostakovich, other notable works being the early opera The Nose, based on Gogol, and the ballet The Golden Age. Incidental music for the theatre includes scores for Shakespeare’s Hamlet and for King Lear, the same two plays being among the films for which he wrote scores.

Orchestral Music

Symphonies

The 15 symphonies of Shostakovich range in scope from the First Symphony of 1925, a graduation composition, to the embittered Thirteenth, which uses Yevtushenko’s poems. The Fourteenth, which contains settings of various poems, came two years before the Fifteenth and last symphony of 1971. The Fifth Symphony, the immediate post-war Ninth, and the Tenth of 1953 are most often heard, while the Second and Third, with the Eleventh and Twelfth, have more overtly patriotic suggestions about them.

Concertos

Shostakovich wrote an early concerto for piano, trumpet and strings, and a second piano concerto in 1957 as a vehicle for his son, Maxim. He wrote two violin concertos and two cello concertos.

Suites

Shostakovich arranged concert suites from many of his film and theatre scores.

Choral and Vocal Music

Choral works by Shostakovich include The Execution of Stepan Razin, a setting of a text by Yevtushenko. His solo songs are generally less overtly political, evidence of a private rather than public voice.

Chamber Music

The 15 string quartets by Shostakovich form a remarkable body of work, lucid in texture, often moving in musical content. The intensely felt Viola Sonata of 1975 is the third of his duo sonatas, preceded by the 1934 Cello Sonata and the Violin Sonata of 1968. To these may be added two piano trios and the G minor Piano Quintet, written in 1944.

Piano Music

The piano music of Shostakovich includes, in addition to two piano sonatas, an ingenious set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, as well as an earlier set of 24 Preludes.

The son of a distinguished Russian singer, Stravinsky spent his earlier years in Russia, either in St Petersburg or, in the summer, at the country estates of his relatives. He studied music briefly with Rimsky-Korsakov but made a name for himself first in Paris with commissions from the impresario Diaghilev, for whom he wrote a series of ballet scores. He spent the years after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in Western Europe and in 1939 moved to the United States of America. There in the post-war years he turned from a style of eclectic neoclassicism to composing in the 12-note technique propounded by Schoenberg. A versatile composer, inventive in changing styles, he may be seen as the musical counterpart of the painter Picasso.

Stage Works
Stravinsky made an immediate impression in Paris with his score for L’Oiseau de feu (‘The Firebird’) for the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev. There followed the very Russian Petrushka, set in a Russian fairground, and then the 1913 succès de scandale of Le Sacre du printemps (‘The Rite of Spring’). After wartime works on a smaller scale, including The Soldier’s Tale, Stravinsky turned again to ballet for Diaghilev in Pulcinella, based on music wrongly attributed to Pergolesi. Later ballets include Apollon musagète, Le Baiser de la fée (‘The Fairy’s Kiss’), Jeu de cartes (‘Card Game’) and Agon. The Latin opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, with a text translated from Cocteau, was first staged in 1928, while the opera The Rake’s Progress, neoclassical in form and based on the engravings of Hogarth, with a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, was staged in Venice in 1951.

Orchestral Music
Stravinsky’s orchestral music includes symphonies, suites from some of the ballets, and two suites arranged from sets of easy piano pieces. Concertos of various kinds include a 1936 Concerto for piano, wind, timpani and double basses, the Ebony Concerto for jazz band, and a Violin Concerto.

Chamber and Instrumental Music
Stravinsky’s chamber music includes some arrangements of orchestral works, in particular two versions of music from Pulcinella, one for violin and piano and one for cello and piano, both under the title Suite italienne.

Choral and Vocal Music
Stravinsky’s choral music ranges from major works such as the Symphony of Psalms to settings of Latin and Slavonic religious texts, the arranged Four Russian Peasant Songs, and the final Requiem Canticles. His solo vocal works are equally varied, including songs from traditional Russian sources, his sacred cantata Abraham and Isaac with its Hebrew text, the Elegy for J.F.K. with a text by W.H. Auden, and a setting of Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat.