On 14 March, the Small Hall of the Shostakovich Philharmonic hosted a gala concert marking the 90th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding composer Alfred Schnittke. I was enthralled by the first part and didn’t notice how the time flew. The music carried me into a world of images that kept leading me to the edge of an abyss, yet never let me fall in.

This is the hallmark of Schnittke’s music: balancing between utter chaos and the place where harmony is still present, albeit in an elusive and complex form. The intensity of the works is incredibly high; the notes seem to fall apart one after another, yet paradoxically this collapse follows a certain script. In my view, it is a special kind of harmony, capable of building up and accumulating a great deal of energy and creating a musical drive on the brink of collapse. At one point the young, fragile pianist, in an elegant ivory satin dress, seemed ready to tear the grand piano apart with her bare hands.

The conductor, a young man with a magnificent mane of hair that flew after every sweep of the baton, looked like someone trying to tame an unruly element. The whole scene of the orchestra’s performance seemed meant to release into the world something powerful, unknowable, contradictory and immensely complex.