String Quartet No.2

‘Larissa Schepitko was a film director (‘Heat’, ‘Wings’, ‘You and I’, ‘Ascent’ - the last film won the best prize at the West Berlin Film Festival in 1977). She died in a car accident at the beginning of the shooting of the film ‘Farewell to Matjoza’ (after V. Rasputin). I was friends with her and her husband, who was also a film director (‘Story of a Dentist’, ‘Sport, Sport, Sport’, ‘Agony’), wrote the music for her last two films and her death was a hard blow for me, as it was for everyone who knew her. Almost all the tonal material of the quartet is taken from old Russian church chant (Russian church music of the XVI-XVII centuries was quite peculiar thanks to its dissonant heterophony), but it is treated quite freely: diatonic themes become chromatic, their intervals are widened or narrowed, an instability of the scale steps is achieved through deliberately complicated playing techniques, which leads to choral effects.’ (Alfred Schnittke)