Just as Schnittke's First Symphony picks up the threads from Shostakovich's last, so his Piano Quintet feels like the natural successor to Shostakovich'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, quartertone- inflected bell-tolling, through the ghosttrain- ride of the film-derived Tempo di valse, through the catatonic laments of the two succeed- ing slow movements, all the way to the anxious transfigurations of the finale.
Curiously, Lubimov goes against the score in the final phrase, where Schnittke asks for pitched notes to fade into the noise of fingertips tapping on the keys, echoing the pedal-knocking at the end of the first movement. But his carefully graded diminuendo is effective enough in its own way.
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. Shostakovich's parched and starved textures can be made to sound even more discomforting, but the Kellers' tonal control brings out its own range of nuance. Recording quality is nicely judged, the players being set in a nicely unobtrusive perspective.