Alfred Schnittke - Story of an unknown actor, op. 125

I - 0:00 II - 2:24 III - 4:40 IV - 6:20 V - 9:33 VI - 11:15 VII - 13:08 VIII - 15:04 IX - 16:05 X - 17:46 XI - 19:11 (waltz) XII - 20:23 XIII - 22:30 “[...] In Schnittke’s 1976 score for the film The Story of an Unknown Actor, he employs a single trite and sentimental melody for almost all the music’s 12 scenes. A kind of Berliozian idée fixé, it follows our angst-plagued protagonist, an aging thespian in a small Siberian troupe; in its constantly changing color and mood, the theme charts the actor’s increasing anxiety and disenchantment. In this sense, Schnittke’s score is classic film music, efficiently appending itself to a plot through single symbolic device, and “sticking with it.“ But at the same time, the seams in Schnittke’s score show; the melody’s stylized, fake-Tchaikovsky “Russian“ pathos in its opening incarnation may strike some as impossibly sincere, its saccharine swagger and soaring scope