Gidon Kremer Prelude in Memorium Shostakovich

With 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets, 9 concertos, and 7 operas, the composer Mieczysław Weinberg left behind an extensive oeuvre. Musically, one can hear the composer’s close friendship with Dmitri Shostakovich, although Weinberg’s music is more lyrical and romantic in nature. Nevertheless, the composer was long forgotten and his music has only been rediscovered in the last ten years. Gidon Kremer has dedicated himself to the rediscovery and cultivation of Weinberg’s music.

Eagerly anticipated album by Georgia’s Giya Kancheli (“the most important composer to have emerged from the former Soviet Union since the death of Shostakovich.” – Time Magazine), released in the year of his 70th birthday. This disc features one of Kancheli’s most ardent champions, the great violinist Gidon Kremer., who plays in duo with his old comrade, Russian pianist Oleg Maisenberg on the 26 minute 'Time… and again”, and leads the Kremerata Baltica on “V & V” for violin, taped voice, and string orchestra.

For collectors of recordings by Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, this 10-disc set called Historical Russian Archives will be just the thing to fill the stray gaps in his discography. Recorded between 1967 and 1992, the sound here ranges from the acceptable to the outstanding, and featuring works from Bach's Chaconne to Salmanov's Second Violin Sonata, the repertoire ranges from the extremely well known to the almost unknown…

“Gidon Kremer has perhaps never before revealed himself as intimately and as existentially focused as on this recording”, observes Wolfgang Sandner in his liner note accompanying the Latvian violinist’s new album Songs of Fate. Together with his Kremerata Baltica chamber ensemble and soprano Vida Miknevičiūtė, Kremer approaches scores by Baltic composers Raminta Šerkšnytė, Giedrius Kuprevičius, Jēkabs Jančevskis and the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg. In a performer’s note, Kremer explains how, reflecting on the different threads that create the fabric of this programme, “I realise – to my own surprise – that in many ways, this project revolves around the notion of ‘Jewishness’.“ Poignant deliveries of excerpts from the Chamber Symphony The Star of David and Kaddish by Giedrius Kuprevičius as well as the Jewish Songs by Mieczysław Weinberg emphasize this connotation.

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 has again recorded the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin of Bach and while his facility and technical grace are intact, in this recording he appears to have been deeply influenced by his time with the moderns (Adams, Pärt, Schnittke, Piazzola, Glass, et al). For this listener it seems that studying and performing these contemporary composers' manipulation of sound and instrumental scope has enriched Kremer's thought about the perfection of Bach. Not everyone will agree with Kremer's approach to these works on this new recording, but for those who know Bach's solo violin pieces there are pleasures in store. Remaining technically suave and with a luxuriant tone, Kremer seems to be communicating with the psychological Bach, offering different tempi and more soulful approaches than those of his colleagues. The results are mesmerizing. Highly recommended.

The New Seasons referred to in the title here are the so-called American Four Seasons, the Violin Concerto No. 2 of Philip Glass, which has even less of a connection to Vivaldi's model than do Astor Piazzolla's Buenos Aires Four Seasons and other works that take Vivaldi as a point of reference. The work is in eight sections, but which ones are supposed to represent which season is left up to the listener. It's really a typical but unusually effective example of late-period Glass, with the composer's usual textures intact but lots of harmonic motion. Part of the interest here lies in hearing Latvian violinist and conductor Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica, long champions of minimalism's Baltic branch, tackle a work by one of the leaders of Western minimalism. The American Four Seasons get a treatment that's a bit rougher than usual, but then Kremer turns around (after a Pärt girls' choir interlude) and delivers pristinely smooth, glassy textures in Giya Kancheli's Ex contrario. The program closes with a fascinating little melody by Japanese rock musician and film composer Shigeru Umebayashi, a daring and effective choice.