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Donald Macleod explores the strange, brilliant and sometimes nightmarish world of Alfred Schnittke. Today - Schnittke's remarkable late creativity in the midst of physical decline.

The music of Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) is like being lost in a hall of mirrors. Staring back at you is the whole of music history - from Bach to modern pop via tangos, Soviet work songs, Gregorian chant and Viennese waltzes - refracted and distorted, and woven together to create a uniquely personal style. Thrilling, grotesque, occasionally nightmarish - Schnittke creates a world where everything has a hidden meaning. Beethoven's Fifth suddenly springs terrifyingly out of the darkness in the midst of an otherwise chaotic symphony. Or a cheap Russian pop song appears inexplicably amidst a Baroque chorale. Schnittke's world of suppressed meanings perfectly captured life under the cosh of Soviet Communism. All this week, Donald Macleod unpicks the strands of a musician often seen as the heir to Shostakovich - and perhaps the last truly great composer of the 20th century.

Schnittke's crippling stroke of 1985 was to be the first of several over the next decade - the last of which would claim his life at the premature age of 63. But rather than easing off, the composer seems to have regarded his mortality as a driver to create ever more music - to compose to the very bitter end, in the face of almost unimaginable physical challenges. In this final programme, Donald Macleod introduces a pair of masterpieces from his final years - his Sixth Symphony, memorably described by one critic as like "a Mahler symphony with the flesh torn away", and a complete performance of the shattering First Piano Sonata.

Stille Nacht
Anne Akiko Myers, violin
Emmanuel Ceysson, harp

Symphony No 6 (3rd & 4th mvts)
´óÏó´«Ã½ National Orchestra of Wales
Tadaaki Otaka, conductor

Piano Sonata No 1
Simon Smith, piano.