Tone Poem Tuesday

Sticking with Alfred Schnittke, to whom I introduced myself last week, we have extracts from a film score of his. The Story of an Unknown Actor is a Soviet film from 1977 for which Schnittke provided the music. I have turned up very little information about the film at this point, save its year and its director, one Aleksandr Zarkhi. I’m wondering if the film isn’t best known now precisely for its score by Schnittke, which has shown up on several recordings.

The score is mainly monothematic, as far as I can tell, but the arrangement here into a series of extracts casts it as a theme-and-variations work, and it ends up being a fairly interesting listen, particularly when Schnittke does different things with his orchestrations. Even in an obscure score to a very obscure film from a nation that no longer exists, Schnittke is an interesting composer.

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