Lento: Piano Quintet / String Quartet No. 15, op. 144

Schnittke's Piano Quintet and Shostakovich's final composition, the 15th String Quartet: crucially important works from the early 1970s whose emphasis on self-expression seems to prefigure an entire landscape of post-Soviet music. Superbly interpreted by the always adventurous Keller Quartet - joined by Alexei Lubimov for the Schnittke.

"Just as Schnittke's First Symphony picks up the threads from Shostakovich's last, so his Piano Quintet feels like the natural successor to Schostakovich's last string quartet; that makes ECM's coupling of the two chamber works an effective and thought-provoking one, the more so since both performances are of the highest quality. This music is a good deal harder to bring off than it looks. The textures are emaciated, and the pain of emotional starvation needs to register with unremitting intensity. In Schnittke's solo piano opening, Alexei Lubimov shows the requisite temperament and control of sonority, and both he and the Kellers keep us inside the Quintet's world through the first movement's obsessive, quartet-tone-inflected bell-tolling, through the ghost-train-ride of the film-derived Tempo di valse, through the catatonic laments of the two succeeding slow movements, all the way to the anxious transfigurations of the finale. ... Single-disc versions of Shostakovich's valedictory quartet are surprisingly thin on the ground. Here, too, the Kellers can stand comparison with the very finest."
- David Fanning, Gramophone