Piano Concerto

Schnittke wrote his Concerto for piano and string orchestra in 1979 for Vladimir Krainev, who gave the premiere in Leningrad. It is a single movement of about twenty-five minutes and is the most played of his works for piano and orchestra: it opens with a bare recitative, gathers into a long crescendo of collisions between tonal and cluster writing, and dissolves at the end into a chorale left hanging. Schnittke also left an early concerto of 1960 and a concerto for piano four hands, so the plain title is ambiguous.