Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Malmö Symphony Orchestra Chamber Ensemble conducted by Lev Markiz.
I - Episode I: Meeting. Moderato - Allegretto Scherzando - Meno Mosso - Adagio: 0:00
II - Episode II. Alienation. Moderato: 12:29
III - Episode III. Alert Automation. Allegretto: 16:05
IV - Episode IV. Horror. Agitato: 18:13
V - Episode V. Cobweb. Cadenza - Andante - Maestoso: 22:11
Schnittke's "Labyrinths" was composed in 1971, written at the behest of Russian ballet-master Vladimir Vasiliev, who wished to participate in a Moscow choreography competition. Vasiliev wrote the libretto, came up with the title and designed the choreography, Schnittke having to adapt when composing the music. Unfortunately, due to a lack of rehearsal time, only the first episode of the fifth was performed in Spring 1972, played by the chamber orchestra of the Bolshoi theatre. Afterwards, the ballet company involved broke up and the dancer Alexander Godunov fled to the west.
Soon, Vasiliev too went abroad with his wife and partner Katerina Maximova. Schnittke later mentioned: "He never returned to this choreographical concept and, when I met him recently in New York, he couldn't remember this project at all. But in the last analysis its failure to materialize was not his fault but the fault of the circumstances. Once again the 'corpse of an idea' remained lying in the cellar of oblivion." The ballet music was given several concert performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but it wasn't until 1989 when "Labyrinths" finally received a choreographic realization. It took the form of a collage that mixed ballet and pantomime, alongside Schnittke's second ballet "Der gelbe Klang" (1973-4), originally after poetic libretto material by Vasili Kandinsky.
The music to the ballet itself is strangely similar in its mixture of the simplistic and dauntingly sophisticated, the naive and the learned, and the funny and scary; indeed, while the score is not one of Schnittke's better known works, "Labyrinths" does provide a veritable maze of figures, moods, and techniques which would become archetypes in Schnittke's later output. The first movement's carnivalesque haunted house of timbres founds itself on the Schnittke "continuo" group, a pearly amalgam of keyboard instruments (piano, celesta, harpsichord) and percussion instruments (marimba, vibraphone, bells, glockenspiel) which blend into a sonic hall of mirrors. So effective in the score's long and disquietingly atmospheric first movement, these sounds would undergo greater invention in Schnittke's Second and Fourth Symphonies (1979, 1984), and indeed provide the conceptual spine for his last great ballet, 1987's "Peer Gynt".
The middle three movements are all inventions and developments of a single mood or process. They are for the most part rapid and scherzo-like accumulations, both on the sonic level (layers of sounds accrue, dynamic and timbral screens grow from transparencies into great blocks), and on level of anxiety -- the rhetorical inversion here happens with deft seamlessness, as the playful flies fast into the terrifying. In the finale, Schnittke realizes he's onto something, and creates a 15-minute last movement whose monolithic progression simply builds upon this unadorned, reverberant sound-world; the climax, resounding rich major thirds, recalls the work's opening gesture, and does so with marvellous equivocality — is this joy? Stricken terror? Again, the rhetoric loopiness maintains a poker-face.
Picture: "The Thinker" (1991) by Russian painter Mikhail Zvyagin.
Sources: tinyurl.com/22979wee and tinyurl.com/24jp6oy8
Unfortunately, the score is not freely available.
Malmö Symphony Orchestra Chamber Ensemble conducted by Lev Markiz.
I - Episode I: Meeting. Moderato - Allegretto Scherzando - Meno Mosso - Adagio: 0:00
II - Episode II. Alienation. Moderato: 12:29
III - Episode III. Alert Automation. Allegretto: 16:05
IV - Episode IV. Horror. Agitato: 18:13
V - Episode V. Cobweb. Cadenza - Andante - Maestoso: 22:11
Schnittke's "Labyrinths" was composed in 1971, written at the behest of Russian ballet-master Vladimir Vasiliev, who wished to participate in a Moscow choreography competition. Vasiliev wrote the libretto, came up with the title and designed the choreography, Schnittke having to adapt when composing the music. Unfortunately, due to a lack of rehearsal time, only the first episode of the fifth was performed in Spring 1972, played by the chamber orchestra of the Bolshoi theatre. Afterwards, the ballet company involved broke up and the dancer Alexander Godunov fled to the west.
Soon, Vasiliev too went abroad with his wife and partner Katerina Maximova. Schnittke later mentioned: "He never returned to this choreographical concept and, when I met him recently in New York, he couldn't remember this project at all. But in the last analysis its failure to materialize was not his fault but the fault of the circumstances. Once again the 'corpse of an idea' remained lying in the cellar of oblivion." The ballet music was given several concert performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but it wasn't until 1989 when "Labyrinths" finally received a choreographic realization. It took the form of a collage that mixed ballet and pantomime, alongside Schnittke's second ballet "Der gelbe Klang" (1973-4), originally after poetic libretto material by Vasili Kandinsky.
The music to the ballet itself is strangely similar in its mixture of the simplistic and dauntingly sophisticated, the naive and the learned, and the funny and scary; indeed, while the score is not one of Schnittke's better known works, "Labyrinths" does provide a veritable maze of figures, moods, and techniques which would become archetypes in Schnittke's later output. The first movement's carnivalesque haunted house of timbres founds itself on the Schnittke "continuo" group, a pearly amalgam of keyboard instruments (piano, celesta, harpsichord) and percussion instruments (marimba, vibraphone, bells, glockenspiel) which blend into a sonic hall of mirrors. So effective in the score's long and disquietingly atmospheric first movement, these sounds would undergo greater invention in Schnittke's Second and Fourth Symphonies (1979, 1984), and indeed provide the conceptual spine for his last great ballet, 1987's "Peer Gynt".
The middle three movements are all inventions and developments of a single mood or process. They are for the most part rapid and scherzo-like accumulations, both on the sonic level (layers of sounds accrue, dynamic and timbral screens grow from transparencies into great blocks), and on level of anxiety -- the rhetorical inversion here happens with deft seamlessness, as the playful flies fast into the terrifying. In the finale, Schnittke realizes he's onto something, and creates a 15-minute last movement whose monolithic progression simply builds upon this unadorned, reverberant sound-world; the climax, resounding rich major thirds, recalls the work's opening gesture, and does so with marvellous equivocality — is this joy? Stricken terror? Again, the rhetoric loopiness maintains a poker-face.
Picture: "The Thinker" (1991) by Russian painter Mikhail Zvyagin.
Sources: tinyurl.com/22979wee and tinyurl.com/24jp6oy8
Unfortunately, the score is not freely available.
