BBCSO/Sinaisky – review

Barbican, LondonAlfred Schnittke wrote much that was uneven, but his vast output also contains extraordinary works – chief among them the Faust Cantata, first performed in 1983. Superbly fusing style and subject, it sets a 16th-century text about Faust's death, cited in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus as the basis for the last work of the novel's syphilitic composer-hero, Adrian Leverkühn. Schnittke casts it as a blasphemous anti-Passion. Bach collides with Shostakovich, Wagner and cabaret; Faus...

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