In recent years, Alfred Schnittke has seemed to provide a point of focus for interest in Russian music which has been absent since the death of Shostakovich in 1975: not least because he appears in some respects to be the latter's natural successor. Many of Shostakovich's aesthetic as well as technical preoccupations have played a significant part in Schnittke's work. Schnittke has developed these preoccupations, in fact, to a further extreme: his principal inheritance from Shostakovich, the sense of irony and alienation, has become the most obvious trait in the music of a composer who has consistently followed his own star quite independently of any stylistic clique.