Gidon Kremer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Sonatas For Violin Solo (ecm Ns)(2022)

These pieces are remembrances of some Gidon Kremer’s passings in Prague, during Soviet time… Kremer was then at the dawn of his career, one among the most brilliant for a violinist in our time! As an ‘ambassador’ of the Soviet Ministry for Culture in the ‘brother countries’, he owed to his mentor, David Oistrakh, a sort of freedom, demonstrated here in this recording. His absolutely perfect touch and his freedom of expression were the delight of his patrons in the welcoming communist countries… The short piece by Alfred Schnittke, then still hand written only, was an example of his wish to play scores out of the ‘classics’ from Bach to Stravinsky and to help other musicians through chamber music sessions. This record allows to hear the faked G.B. Guadagnini inherited from his grandfather.

Gidon Kremer and Harnoncourt imbue the Violin Concerto with intellectual strength and Romantic warmth.

DG has put together a very smart reissue here. "Concerto grosso 1" and "Quasi una sonata" for violin and chamber orchestra were originally released in 1989. "Concerto grosso 5" has been rescued from its original 1993 release back-to-back with a Glass piece, and is now united with the other Kremer performances of Schnittke.

The trio on this dics is chamber music performance at its highest level of enjoyment. Listening to the CD, you get an impression of three great friends having a most delightful conversation, elegant and graceful. The recorded sound is first rate. You hear all the details of instruments being played and also the acoustic features of the room in which they performed. It is interesting to compare this one with a Mozart trio played by Dumay, Wang and Pires, which features more modern recorded sound and the same delight in the musicans playing the music together. The duos on this CD are equally enjoyable. I particularly like the nostalgically nasal yet lush tone of the viola Kashkashian played.

The viola was Hindemith's instrument (though he could play almost any), and he wrote some of his most expressive chamber music for it. This two-disc set includes all four of Hindemith's sonatas for solo violin and the three for viola and piano. I prefer the wildness of Hindemith's earlier music to the sometimes arid calm of his later music, so listeners like myself who like Hindemith can have a feast here as most of these are early works. They are played with energy and passion by an outstanding violist and a fine pianist.

Leonard Bernstein and the Wiener Philharmoniker perform Brahms orchestral works. Between 1981 and 1984 Leonard Bernstein recorded nearly all of Brahms's orchestral works with the Wiener Philharmoniker to honor the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth in 1983. For the concertos, Bernstein enlisted the services of some of the finest Brahms interpreters of the time: the violoninst Gidon Kremer, the cellist Mischa Maisky and the pianist Krystian Zimerman.

Despite the deceptive titling format on the CD, this is a CD by Latvian violinist Gidon Kramer, not featuring the playing of Astor Piazzolla. All but four of the songs on the album are compositions by Piazzolla, but performed by Kremer and his group, along with Piazzolla's guitarists Sergio and Odair Assad. The album is definitely in tribute to the leader of the nuevo tango, as the lengthy liner notes describe in three languages.

This was one of the first digital version (the very first?) of Tchaikovsky's violin concerto and remains pretty competitive though perhaps not a first choice. Kremer's playing is surely polished and technically impressive; the phrasing is wonderful and the tone beautiful. Still, it is unfortunately a little short on charm and expressive depth - Tchaikovsky's concerto isn't really the most appropriate vehicle neither for classical restraint nor almost curmudgeonly introspective approaches; it is peripatetic grand drama and passion and heart-on-sleeve through and through and despite Kremer's sweetness of tone he never manages to scale the heights or plunge the emotional abysses of the music.