Abstract
Alfred Schnittke is a great composer of the 20th century and a fascinating artistic personality who defies all stylistic categorisation. Biographically, he has Latvian-Jewish and Volga-German Catholic roots. He lived in Vienna when he was young, later in Moscow and at the end of his life in Hamburg. He says of himself: «I don't belong to anyone, I have no country and no place.» This sense of homelessness in his life led to great artistic independence. Schnittke stood in the tradition of Russian musical modernism, but also worked his way through the forms of the Baroque, Mozart, Schubert and film music. Parallel to his opera Leben mit einem Idioten on the main stage, we are presenting two of his most beautiful, virtuosic and polystylistically fascinating instrumental works in this season's Opera nova concert: the Concerto grosso No. 3 and the Violin Concerto.