Ragged Music Festival - Big emotion and blissful silence

Epilogue from Peer Gynt and Tchaikovsky's lyrical Piano Trio

In the moving epilogue that Alfred Schnittke composed for Henrik Ibsen's cinematic stage adaptation of the Peer Gynt, the death of the modern troubled, self-centered Peer becomes a redemptive transfiguration. The piano falls silent and against the background of the thin choir sounds on tape, Peer's life evaporates in the ever-rising cello. It sounds very different, and less ambiguous, but Schnittke's thin heights represent the same blissful silence in which Richard Strauss' highly romantic song Morgen! ends.

Tchaikovsky's lyrical Piano Trio – a large piece that lasts more than 45 minutes – especially sings about the great Slavic emotion, so decisive for Russian composition from Mussogsky to Shostakovich, Schnittke and Ustvolskaya.