Alfred Schnittke

A Schnittke movement can pass from Baroque pastiche to a tango to a wall of dissonance to a hymn within a few minutes, and the joins are left visible on purpose.

He was born in Engels, on the Volga, to a Jewish father from Frankfurt and a Volga German mother, spent part of his childhood in Vienna, and studied and then taught at the Moscow Conservatory. He died in Hamburg. Nothing in that outline is incidental: a composer with three nationalities and no single tradition to inherit is a plausible candidate for inventing a style made of other people's styles.

What polystylism is, and why it was a political act

Polystylism is the technique of setting incompatible musical languages against each other within one work rather than choosing between them, and Schnittke set out the idea in a 1971 paper on polystylistic tendencies in modern music. It takes two forms: quotation, where an identifiable passage by another composer is inserted intact, and allusion, where the style rather than the notes is imitated so the listener recognises a manner without placing a source.

In the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s this was not a neutral aesthetic choice. Official doctrine required a single approved manner, accessible and affirmative, and treated Western modernism as decadent. Polystylism broke the rule in both directions: it used serialism and aleatory writing, which were disapproved of, and put them beside waltzes, chorales and film music, so the disapproved material could not be quarantined as an isolated experiment. It also carried an argument the censor could not easily rebut. If a composer merely quotes Bach, a tango and a Soviet march and lets them collide, the collision does the criticising and nothing has been stated.

The practical consequences were ordinary rather than dramatic. Symphony No. 1, finished in 1972, could not get a Moscow performance and was first played in Gorky in 1974, a closed city where the Composers' Union paid less attention. He was not imprisoned and not silenced, but his large works were slow to be heard, and that pattern matters for what follows.

The symphonies, the concerti grossi and the films

Five bodies of work carry the output, written for quite different purposes.

The film work deserves more than a footnote. Composing for Soviet cinema was steady, well paid and politically safe, and it gave him a working knowledge of pastiche across every genre a director might ask for. That fluency is what the concert works deploy: the concerti grossi are not a scholar's idea of Baroque style, they are a film composer's.

Symphony against concerto, and what a concerto grosso is

A symphony is a work for orchestra alone, usually in several movements, in which no single player is set against the rest. A concerto sets one soloist against the orchestra: the soloist leads, the orchestra answers, and a cadenza gives the soloist a stretch alone. A concerto grosso is the older Baroque arrangement between the two, in which a small group of soloists, the concertino, is set against the full body, the ripieno.

Schnittke's revival of the form in 1977 was pointed. He took a shape abandoned around 1750, kept its structure, and filled it with twentieth century material, so the ear is told to expect Vivaldi and given something else. The prepared piano in the first concerto grosso is the emblem of the procedure: an instrument that looks like the harpsichord's descendant and has had screws and rubber put between its strings.

Nagasaki, and how a work disappears for 48 years

Nagasaki is an oratorio for mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra that Schnittke wrote in 1958 at the Moscow Conservatory, on a text by Anatoly Sofronov about the atomic bombing of the city. Moscow Radio recorded it in 1959. It was then left unpublished and unperformed until its public world premiere on 23 November 2006 in Cape Town, given by Owain Arwel Hughes with the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, the Cape Town Opera Voice of the Nation chorus and the mezzo-soprano Hanneli Rupert. That is a gap of 48 years, and Schnittke had been dead for eight of them.

The disappearance is not mysterious once the mechanics of Soviet music publishing are set out. Five things had to fail, and all five did.

• Publication was a state function. A score not accepted by the state houses was never engraved, so no printed full score and no printed parts existed anywhere.
• Performance material is separate from the score. An orchestra cannot play from a manuscript; somebody must copy out 60 or 70 individual parts, and that is weeks of paid work nobody would fund for a rejected student piece.
• Programming was controlled. Concert planning ran through the Composers' Union, and a work passed over at its hearing did not reappear on a schedule by accident.
• The subject was awkward. A large, dissonant treatment of a nuclear atrocity was not what the cultural authorities of 1958 wanted from a graduation exercise.
• The composer moved on. Schnittke never pressed for the piece during the decades in which his later music was making his name, and after his death in 1998 there was nobody with an obvious interest in retrieving a student work.

What broke the pattern was the reverse of all five: somebody located the material, somebody paid for a performing edition, and an orchestra outside the piece's own country agreed to give it. Symphony No. 0, an even earlier student work, was in the same position and had its first performance in the same place at the same time. Both were recorded for BIS at Cape Town City Hall in November 2006, and Owain Arwel Hughes also recorded Schnittke's Symphony No. 9 for the same label.

The case is not unique, only unusually well documented. Archives of twentieth century composers are full of scores that exist in one manuscript copy, have no parts, and would need a few thousand pounds and somebody's stubbornness to be heard. Nagasaki shows how long that can take: 48 years from the writing of the piece to the first audience.

Also in this programme

• The repertoireThe pieces that keep coming back, and why
• Edward ElgarThe Enigma Variations, the Cello Concerto and the symphonies
• Ralph Vaughan WilliamsThe Tallis Fantasia, the Lark and the symphonies
• The Cape Town yearsThe Philharmonic, and two Schnittke premieres