Lucas Debargue / Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica ZAL

 

ZAL

 

Mario Brunello / Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica SEARCHING FOR LUDWIG

SEARCHING FOR LUDWIG

 

Kremerata Baltica / Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla WORKS BY RAMINTA ŠERKŠNYTĖ

                                             WORKS BY RAMINTA ŠERKŠNYTĖ

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla / Gidon Kremer / City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kremerata Baltica WEINBERG Symphonies Nos. 2 & 21

The Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla launches her new exclusive relationship with Deutsche Grammophon on 3 May 2019 with the release of an album devoted to Mieczysław Weinberg’s music. It showcases one of Weinberg’s earliest compositions, the Second Symphony for strings of 1946, and the Symphony No.21 “Kaddish”, completed in 1991, his haunting memorial to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. Kremerata Baltica perform Symphony No.2 and join the CBSO for No.21. The violin solos in the latter work are played by Gidon Kremer. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director since 2016, is convinced that listeners will be deeply affected by the composer’s works, which bear witness not only to the variety of his output but its consistently high artistic quality.

“In my opinion Weinberg’s definitely one of the most important composers of the twentieth century,” she observes. “We have an enormous amount of works by him. There are twenty-two symphonies, seventeen string quartets, seven operas, music for film and television, circus and theatre. Each of those works has an incredible ability to speak to performers, to listeners. One can only really judge after encountering those works or at least the majority of them, just how important he is as a composer.”

Echoing his own life experiences, much of Weinberg’s production reveals the influence of some of the most tragic moments in 20th-century history. Born to a Jewish family in Warsaw on 8 December 1919, Weinberg showed early musical talent as a pianist. He was forced to abandon his studies in 1939 when his country was invaded at first by the Nazis, then by Stalin’s Red Army. His mother, father and sister were murdered by the Nazis, while most of his extended family also perished in the Holocaust. He found temporary refuge in Belarus, then headed east to Tashkent when Hitler turned against the Soviet Union in 1941. Shostakovich, impressed by his younger contemporary’s First Symphony, invited him to Moscow in 1943. Weinberg lived there until his death 53 years later.

The Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer has played a central role in promoting the composer’s music. He launched the centenary celebrations this January on tour with his Kremerata Baltica ensemble, a chamber orchestra comprising outstanding young musicians from the Baltic states. When Kremer was appointed as the CBSO’s artist-in-residence for 2018-19, he and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla placed Weinberg at the heart of their programme plans. In an innovative but ultimately hugely successful move, they also decided to bring Kremerata Baltica to Birmingham last November to join forces with the CBSO for the UK premiere of Weinberg’s Symphony No.21 and for DG’s recording sessions

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica HYMNS AND PRAYERS

A beautifully-recorded album from master violinist Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata, Baltica, spanning a wide range of music, all of it broached with conviction. Hungarian composer and pianist Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer from the Serbian province of Vojvodina has written eight hymns in commemoration of the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, an artist he has called a homo moralis whose remarkable visions cast a small but significant light on the tragic world of the previous century. Georgian composer Giya Kancheli contributes a silent prayer for two of his most important musical associates: the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and the violinist Gidon Kremer. The contemplative intensity of the hymns and the ascetic tranquillity of the prayer are offset by César Franck‘s Piano Quintet in F minor like a premonition of Beethoven’s Appassionata, whose second movement, marked Lento, molto sentimento, in turn takes up the mood of the other two works. This programmatic combination underlines an intrinsic principle Paul Klee developed in his theory of harmony in the visual arts: any compositional harmony will gain character through dissonances, with the balance being restored by counterweights. (ECM Records)

GIYA KANCHELI In l’istesso tempo

“In l’istesso tempo” is an important addition to Giya Kancheli’s ECM discography. His ninth album for the New Series consists of “Time… and again” played, for the first time on disc by its dedicatees, Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer and Ukrainian pianist Oleg Maisenberg, plus premiere recordings of “V & V” with Kremer and Kremeratica Baltica, and the Piano Quartet (subtitled ‘In l’istesso tempo’) performed by the Bridge Ensemble.

The Kremer/Kancheli connection is long-established. The Latvian violinist was one of the first to play the Georgian composer’s music in the West, and he has always seemed temperamentally attuned to Kancheli’s characteristic compositional gestures – the extreme dynamics, the Spartan textures, the emotional volatility, and the use of limited materials to attain a cumulative expressive power. Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s early assessment of Kancheli as "an ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist -- a restrained Vesuvius" is still very much to the point, as Kremer well understands.

The last time Kremer and Kancheli combined forces on disc was for the critically-lauded “Lament”, Kancheli’s memorial music for Luigi Nono. “Time…and Again” had a very different geneis. It was originally commissioned for the Schubert bicentennial celebrations at London’s Barbican theatre and intended to be performed as part of Gidon Kremer and Oleg Maisenberg’s Schubert cycle. Kancheli’s first thought was to load the work with “hidden or obvious references to Schubert” a plan he rather quickly abandoned: “It became clear this idea was provoking an inner resistance. Only one solution remained, to rely on my own experiences and work with them instead.” Giya Kancheli now views “Time…And Again” as the culmination of a creative period that began with “Trauerfarbenes Land”, a period in which a continuing preoccupation was the simplifying and clarifying of his harmonic language.

“V and V” was written at the urging of Yehudi Menuhin and first performed at the Menuhin Festival in Gstad Switzerland in 1995. Gidon Kremer has programmed the piece on many occasions – memorably performing it, for instance, alongside Pärt’s “Tabula rasa” at the 1999 London Proms. The present recording of “V & V” was made at Lockenhaus in 2003.

The Piano Quartet was commissioned by the Bridge Quartet, so named because they hoped to bridge Eastern and Western musical cultures, a goal with which Kancheli could sympathize. At the time of the recording the ensemble, formed in Seattle in the 1990s, was comprised of two Russians, David Tonkonogui (cello) and Mikhail Schmidt (violin), with British violist Helen Callus and American pianist Karen Sigers.

Kancheli travelled to Seattle to rehearse the work with the ensemble, a work of which he was to write, “Here you won’t find appeals for a bright future. Most likely you will find threads of sorrow caused by the imperfection of the world, which keeps disregarding the most horrendous examples from human history”. Critics found an austere beauty in the work, nonetheless: “Kancheli appreciates the power of silence,” said Gavin Borchert, in the Seattle Weekly. “The melodic lines, too, keep to small intervals, built mainly out of stepwise motion or obsessive repeated notes. The work preserves one steady pulse throughout; all tempo changes come as a doubling or halving of the pace. These artful restrictions build up an amazing tension, broken by just a few sudden upheavals, and a crushingly violent central passage, and later resolved into moments of melting loveliness.” (ECM Records)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica SILENCIO

Kremer's orchestra returns with a program of music centered (for the most part) on silence. With the exception of the first movement of Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa, the works on this recording explore themes of quiet and introspection. Not that these pieces are background music; these are all complex pieces. Glass' Company, in fact, has a cascade of liquid passages full of arpeggiations and complex rhythms. The overall effect, however, is one of peacefulness. Interesting, too, the titles of the pieces lend themselves to images of intimacy -- titles Company, Come In!, and Darf Ich (German for "May I"). Come In! features soft and delicate music interspersed with a knocking sound. Opening movement "Ludus" from Tabula Rasa is the exception to the disc, with fiery intensity and almost unbearable tension. The Kremerata Baltica performs exquisitely and seem to do so effortlessly. This disc features two premiere recordings (Come In! and Darf ich) and one first recorded arrangement for string orchestra (Company). (Mark Allender)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica MIECZYSLAW WEINBERG Chamber Symphonies - Piano Quintet

In 2014 ECM New Series featured Kremerata Baltica in a widely-praised album dedicated to the music of Mieczysław Weinberg. Now Gidon Kremer’s orchestra continues the story, turning its attention to the four chamber symphonies completed in the last decade of the Polish-born Soviet composer’s life. The arc of the album – recorded in Vienna and in Riga in June 2015 – also embraces a striking new arrangement, by Gidon Kremer and Kremerata percussionist Andrey Pushkarev, of Weinberg’s early Piano Quintet.

In his recollection of Mieczysław Weinberg in the liner notes, fellow composer Alexander Raskatov speaks of the “incredible renaissance” of Weinberg’s music, a revival which might well have amazed its author. Since his death in 1996, Weinberg’s work has been widely re-evaluated, with Gidon Kremer and Kremeratica Baltica have been among the artists calling for broader recognition for a composer who “strongly opposed any division of music into avant-garde and ‘arrière-garde’, as Raskatov remembers.

The Kremer/Pushkarev arrangement of the Piano Quintet op. 18 extends the creative spirit of Weinberg’s reworkings of his own material: each of his chamber symphonies developed earlier music and took it to new places. The kernel of the Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1986) can be found in Weinberg’s Second String Quartet, written 45 years earlier. “He continued the process,” writes David Fanning in the liner notes, “by reworking his Third String Quartet as Chamber Symphony No. 2 and his Fifth String Quartet as Chamber Symphony No. 3. These were all rehabilitations of previously unpublished works. Finally he added the profoundly introspective Chamber Symphony No. 4, his last completed opus, based not on a string quartet but on several of his late works,”

Weinberg’s chamber symphonies are, Gidon Kremer says, “the most personal reflections of a great composer on his own life and his generation, like a diary of the most dramatic period of the 20th century.”

The violinist considers the present Weinberg recording “the most valuable landmark” in Kremerata Baltica’s discography, and the album is released in time for a major tour celebrating both the orchestra’s 20th anniversary as well as its leader’s 70th birthday. Weinberg’s compositions form an integral part of the orchestra’s concert repertoire in the current season. (ECM Records)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica GEORGE ENESCU Octet, Op. 7 - Quintet, Op. 29

Featuring the first recording of two works by George Enescu -- the String Octet, Op. 7, and the Piano Quintet, Op. 29 -- this album introduces the listener to the fascinating, multifaceted, and intriguing world of the Romanian master's chamber music. Enescu's music is expertly performed by members of the extraordinary KREMERata BALTICA under the direction of Gidon Kremer, who plays first violin in both pieces. Kremer wisely chose the music, for the two works in many ways exemplify the salient features of the Enescu's musical language and reflect his development from an eclectic, post-Romantic style to a richer, more complex and personal idiom. Composed in 1900, the lush, colorful, and dynamic octet is played with remarkable subtlety, balance, and sense of nuance. The string players find the exact tonal color to perfectly conjure up Enescu's polychromous musical imagery, also impeccably expressing a wide range of moods from lyrically intimate to ardently symphonic. In the piano quintet, which Enescu composed in 1940, the players rise to the challenge of interpreting a work presenting many technical and artistic problems, many stemming from the composer's austerely sophisticated idiom. Indeed, the KREMERata, completely mastering the many complexities of Enescu's style, rewards listeners with the shared experience of highly significant, albeit lesser-known, works of twentieth century chamber music. (Zoran Minderovic)

Gidon Kremer EDITION LOCKENHAUS

Five-CD limited-edition box set, issued in time for the 30th anniversary of the Austrian chamber-music festival. “Edition Lockenhaus” returns long out-of-print titles to the catalogue, with some of the finest musicians of the New Series, including Gidon Kremer, Kim Kashkashian, Heinz Holliger, Thomas Zehetmair, Thomas Demenga, Robert Levin, Eduard Brunner and many more. Gidon Kremer: “The artistic atmosphere in Lockenhaus soon has everybody speaking on the same wavelength.” The set opens with previously unreleased recordings – from 2001 and 2008 – with Sir Simon Rattle and Roman Kofman conducting Kremerata Baltica in revelatory performances of Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” and Olivier Messiaen’s “Trois petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine”: the committed interpretations convey the spirit of Lockenhaus. Discs two through five focus on music of César Franck, André Caplet, Francis Poulenc, Leos Janácek, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Erwin Schulhoff. Original liner notes, an interview with Kremer, and new texts complete a very special edition. (ECM Records)

Anna Vinnitskaya / Kremerata Baltica SHOSTAKOVICH Piano Concertos

This is a remarkable debut disc from Russian-German pianist Anna Vinnitskaya. The two Shostakovich piano concertos are brilliant and entertaining, parodic and pensive in turn. In the Concerto in C Minor for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, Op.35 (1933) soloist-director Vinnitskaya maintains tight ensemble and clear articulation with the Kremerata Baltica string orchestra and trumpeter Tobias Willner. The first movement illustrates Shostakovich’s method of assembling triads, scales and popular songs or classical themes into an ironic crazy-quilt whole, featuring harmonic sidesteps into new keys. In the second movement strings play a wide-ranging lyrical melody with poise, as a muted trumpet in dialogue with the piano does later. The virtuosic finale features Vinnitskaya’s still more rapid-fire piano and Willner’s matching double-tonguing. 

In the Piano Concerto No.2 in F Major, Op.102 (1957), Omer Meir Wellber conducts the Winds of Staatskapelle Dresden together with Kremerata Baltica. The first and third major-key movements are tuneful in accordance with Soviet expectations, with military band-style flourishes and plenty of piano scales. The third however has sufficient contrast: it is largely in 7/4 metre, woodwinds are brilliant and French horns a standout, and there is even a quoted Hanon piano finger exercise! Best of all for me is Anna Vinnitskaya’s sensitive high-register playing in the the middle movement, which seems like a reminiscence of childhood. In the disc’s last two works pianist Ivan Rudin joins Vinnitskaya in idiomatic playing of Shostakovich’s Concertino (1954) and Tarantella (1955) for two pianos. Recommended for Shostakovich lovers. (Roger Knox)

Gidon Kremer / Patricia Kopatchinskaja / Kremerata Baltica GIYA KANCHELI Chiaroscuro

Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s latest ECM New Series album, issued shortly after his 80^th birthday, features first recordings of two major works: Chiaroscuro for violin and chamber orchestra, and Twilight for two violins and chamber orchestra. Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica have had a long and close association with Giya Kancheli. On Twilight, the coming together of Kremer and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, two of the most powerfully expressive violinists of our era, makes for fascinating listening. The piece is a touching meditation on mortality, written at a time when Giya Kancheli was recovering from illness and seeing in the leaves and branches of poplar trees outside his window a metaphor for change and transformation. 

Twilight, Kancheli’s first piece composed for two solo violins and strings was written on Gidon Kremer’s initiative for the annual Mozart Week in Salzburg. “In my professional life various superb performers have appeared at different periods,” Giya Kancheli writes in the liner notes.

“I am very happy that for the ECM production of Twilight Gidon Kremer joined forces with Patricia Kopatchinskaja. At the rehearsal I realized from the first bars that Patricia has all the attributes of a distinguished musical personality.” Kopatchinskaja, for her part, much enjoyed the encounter with fellow violinist Kremer: “This was one of my strongest and most moving experiences….I grew up and educated myself with the sounds and visions of Gidon Kremer. He is the musician and thinker who always captures me with all senses and trust, when listening to anything he does.”
The title composition Chiaroscuro borrows its name from the painting technique of the renaissance and baroque whose concern with dramatic contrasts of light and shade corresponds quite directly to the characteristically stark dynamics of the composer’s writing, vigorously conveyed by Kremerata Baltica. The piece was originally written for Julian Rachlin, to be performed by him on both violin and viola.

After its premiere both Yuri Bashmet and Gidon Kremer asked Kancheli for independent versions, and these were subsequently developed and performed. As Kancheli remarks, “Profound personalities always discover in the music something that cannot be expressed in notes and signs … They effectively become co-authors of the works they perform.”
In this sense, Gidon Kremer – as masterful interpreter – has been ‘co-authoring’ Giya Kancheli’s work since 1998 and his riveting performance of Lament – Music In Mourning Of Luigi Nono. Other Kremer/Kancheli collaborations on ECM include Time…and Again and V & V (on the album In L’istesso tempo, recorded in 2000 and 2003), Silent Prayer (on Hymns and Prayers, recorded 2008) and Themes from the Songbook (recorded 2010). Kremerata Baltica, too, has been programming Kancheli’s music from the beginning of its history. Gidon Kremer: “Giya’s music has become an inseparable part of the Kremerata Baltica orchestra’s repertoire: each year, each season we have studied and played one or two of his pieces. Despite our previous acquaintance, each piece reveals something new and special.” (ECM Records)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica THE ART OF INSTRUMENTION: HOMAGE TO GLENN GOULD

Nonesuch Records releases The Art of Instrumentation: Homage to Glenn Gould, by violinist Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra, on September 25, 2012, which would have been Gould’s 80th birthday. The album comprises 11 pieces and arrangements by contemporary composers that quote from or are inspired by works, mostly by Bach, that Gould famously recorded during his career; two Arnold Schoenberg pieces also are drawn upon in one piece.

Kremer explains: “For the tenth anniversary of the Chamber Music Connects the World festival in Kronberg, Germany in 2010, I took up an idea that happens to have been voiced by a friend of mine, Robert Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch. One day, we were discussing Glenn Gould—whom Bob had known for years and with whom I had spent a long night in the studio, along with András Schiff—when Bob asked me, ‘Wouldn’t you like to arrange some of the works played by Glenn Gould for strings sometime?’

“When artistic director Raimund Trenkler asked me what could be done to make the anniversary celebration special, I knew the answer. The focus was to be on one of the greatest figures of all time—Johann Sebastian Bach—and on our times. A bridge was to be built,” Kremer continues. “The resulting program’s distant gaze extends into the realm of Bach but pays tribute at the same time to one of the greatest personae of modern interpretation, Glenn Gould. A persona, whose handwriting cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s. That is precisely what I have always valued so highly and still do—the unique.”

Kremerata Baltica was founded by Gidon Kremer in 1996 and is composed of a group of young musicians from the three Baltic States. They first performed in the violinist’s hometown of Riga, Latvia, in February 1996 and have since toured throughout the world. Kremer, who is the group’s artistic director, described the Kremerata Baltica, in an interview with the New York Times, as “a musical democracy ... open-minded, self-critical, a continuation of my musical spirit.” (Nonesuch)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica GLASS - PÄRT - KANCHELI - UMEBAYASHI New Seasons

Gidon Kremer returns to the Yellow label after more than a decade with the brand new reference recording of Philip Glass’ Second Violin Concerto – “The American Seasons”, his first solo concerto album in many years.The first Glass Violin Concerto, performed by Kremer and released by DG in 1993, has achieved cult status and shipped close to 90k units (in Germany alone over 25k copies) – and has become a staple of DG’s contemporary music catalogue.

Now, this extraordinary follow-up Concerto is at the heart of the repertoire of the Kremerata Baltica. Performed for the first time in San José, Costa Rica with Gidon Kremer as soloist in August 2013, it will be toured later in the year - info to follow shortly.

The album is completed by works of Arvo Pärt and Giya Kancheli – two composers both closely associated with Gidon Kremer, and who are both set to celebrate milestone 80th birthdays this year. Gidon has also added the short piece by the well-known Japanese film composer Shigeru Umebayashi as a tribute to his Japanese friends.

Four highly regarded visual artists and film maker have created four different films for each of the American Seasons that are projected to screens during concert performances. (Presto Classical)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica VICTOR KISSINE Between Two Waves

Issued in time for the 60th birthday of the composer from St Petersburg, “Between Two Waves” is the first ECM disc devoted entirely to Victor Kissine’s music. It follows on, chronologically and conceptually, from two earlier New Series recordings (ECM 1883 and ECM 2202), both of which featured Gidon Kremer and his associates.
It was while working with Kremer and friends on the realization of his luminous orchestration of Schubert’s Quartet in G Major in 2003 that Kissine began to consider the creative possibilities of a new piece that would be “orchestral but intimate - a kind of ‘concerto in watercolour’.” This was the conceptual idea that set in motion the composition “Barcarola”, for violin solo, string orchestra and percussion.
All three pieces on the present disc of premiere recordings are dedicated to their respective interpreters, and all draw inspiration from the poetry of Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. The three compositions were recorded at the Lockenhuas Festival 2011 and form “a kind of cycle” in the words of the composer. A unifying factor is “a flavour of the sea”. The topography of St Petersburg, city of canals (“the Venice of the North”) may also be reflected in the project, Kissine says: “Right bank, left bank and the two open arms of the bridge in between. The “Duo After Osip Mandelstam” [for viola and violoncello] begins and ends with a see breeze, while the waves in “Between Two Waves” [concerto for piano and string orchestra] unfurl right up to ‘Barcarola’.” The pieces are also linked by references to Bach, explicit in the Duo and implied in “Between Two Waves” and “Barcarola”.
The music’s signature, however is unmistakably Kissine’s. “Many experiences and emotions – friendship, admiration and affinity – lie beneath the surface of this reticent musical language,” Belgian critc Frans C. Lemaire has noted. “[It] prefers soft murmurings to loud pronouncements, and closely restricts the development of the melodic material. [Kissine’s] music does not celebrate vain and noisy human activity, but seeks to recapture a kind of lost harmony which – far removed from the world – is borne up by the mysterious voices of silence.“

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica FRANZ SCHUBERT String Quartet G major

“Openness”, Gidon Kremer once said, is his life’s guiding principle, “openness towards everything new“. The great violinist was speaking not only of contemporary composition for which he has tirelessly proselytized, but also of a willingness to explore unfamiliar settings and new contexts for well-known works. Reevaluating standard repertoire has been one of the themes of his work with Kremerata Baltica, the ensemble of gifted young musicians he founded in 1997. The ensemble’s interpretative skills are well-displayed in this recording of Franz Schubert’s String Quartet in G major in the arrangement for string orchestra by Victor Kissine. Recorded at the church at Lockenhaus, where Kremer has directed his annual chamber music festival since 1981, the spatial dimension of the sound seems like an aural analogy to the violinist’s credo of openness.
Of course open-mindedness does not rule out fidelity: for many years Kremer has shown a special affinity for Schubert. Few other contemporary violinists have paid such close attention to the work of the Viennese master. Alongside the central violin works, Kremer has previously recorded (for Deutsche Grammophon) the three Sonatinas and a host of smaller pieces in exemplary interpretations, drawn to the fragile beauty of Schubert’s music as well as to its frequent fractures and ruptures. Kremer’s fine-nerved musicianship addresses both aspects, while the immense technical challenges appeal to the virtuoso in him. He has also returned frequently to Schubert’s chamber music, in the case of the quartet literature working intensively on Schubert’s final contribution to this genre, the 1826 G major String Quartet.
In bringing Kissine’s orchestration of this work into the repertoire of Kremerata Baltica, Kremer combined a quasi didactical aspect – the intention to introduce the players to profound compositions – with a personal wish to illumine these works in new ways by interpreting them with young partners. In the course of close collaboration with Kremer, Kissine’s orchestration of Schubert’s G major quartet met with vital modifications and refinements. The correspondence between interpreter and arranger, reproduced in part in the CD booklet, indicates how scrupulously they have endeavoured to meet the spirit of Schubert’s score.
Victor Kissine, born in St Petersburg in 1953 and a Belgian resident since 1990, has created an extensive compositional œuvre that covers a wide range of genres and instrumentation. His orchestration of Schubert addresses the evident orchestral qualities of this piece, but furthermore creates a precisely graded spectrum, from intimate solo quartet to voluminous tutti – a perfect example can be heard right at the beginning of the first movement. Every pizzicato of the contrabass, every voicing of a chord, but mostly the extremely differentiated orchestral forces between solo und tutti are meticulously embedded in the formal context.
Schubert’s last quartet – the work of a 29-year-old – is, alongside Beethoven’s contemporaneous quartet in B flat major opus 130, one of the most comprehensive quartets of the era. The technical skills that this score requires are also extreme. A characteristic of this opus 161 is the alternation between major and minor that is inscribed already in the opening bars. Unlike the “Rosamunde” Quartet and “Death and the Maiden”, the great G major quartet makes no allusions to Schubert’s Lieder, which may in part account for its comparative neglect. The quartet was not premiered until 1850, by the Hellmesberger Quartett. While “Der Tod und das Mädchen” was orchestrated by Gustav Mahler, and frequently performed since then, the quartet in G major had not been previously orchestrated

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica MIECZYSLAW WEINBERG

This new album from Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica and soloists, recorded at Neuhardenberg and Lockenhaus in 2012 and 2013, makes a strong case for Shostakovich’s assertion that Weinberg was one of the great composers of his era. He was certainly amongst the most prolific, with a work list that includes seven operas, twenty-two symphonies, ten concertos, seventeen string quartets and a vast output of chamber and vocal works.
Born in Warsaw in 1919, Mieczysław Weinberg studied at the Polish capital’s conservatory. His plans for further study in the United States were thwarted by the outbreak of World War II: when the Nazis invaded Poland, Weinberg fled first to Minsk and then to Tashkent. He moved to Moscow in 1943 where, his troubles far from over, he was targeted both for his modernist musical leanings and his Jewish background. (With some of his works blacklisted, Weinberg’s only income for years came from incidental music written for local theatre productions.) In 1953 he was arrested on charges of ‘Jewish bourgeois nationalism’, and jailed. Shostakovich wrote letters on his behalf, and after Stalin’s death Weinberg was released and officially rehabilitated.
Near neighbours in Moscow, Weinberg and Shostakovich spent much time together. As Wolfgang Sandner writes in the liner notes, “the two close friends, though thirteen years apart, constantly showed each other their new scores, often played piano duets together and exchanged ideas on art and composition.” Like many composers in the Soviet Union, Weinberg was obliged to spend much of his creative life negotiating the margins of freedom between official doctrine and artistic necessity. As the demands from above for Socialist Realism began to slacken in the 1960s and 70s, his art moved into its most productive phase.
The present double album opens with one of his most remarkable creations from this latter period, the extensive (22-minutes) and complex third violin sonata of 1978. Kremer ranks this work alongside Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin as one of the masterpieces for the instrument.
“This is music that speaks to us,” writes Wolfgang Sandner, “full of dynamism, colour and detailed articulation that never ossifies into virtuosity for its own sake. The wealth of invention in the sonata and the advanced sounds of the Tenth Symphony bear witness to a composer at the same high level as a Shostakovich or Prokofiev.”
Kremer and friends explore Weinberg’s chamber music – the Trio op 48 (composed 1950) and the Sonatina op.46 (1949) – and the commitment and skills of the Kremerata musicians are brought to bear on two strikingly-contrasting compositions for string orchestra, the graceful and lyrical Concertino op. 42 (1948) and the adventurous and gripping Symphony no 10 (1968), bringing12-tone rows and chordal structure into unexpected juxtapositions.
Mieczysław Weinberg died in Moscow in 1996. In recent years his works have begun to get a wider hearing. In particular his opera about the Holocaust, “The Passenger”, never staged in Weinberg’s lifetime, has made headlines. After a concertante version was produced in Moscow in 2006, the full staged version was premiered at the Bregenz Festival in 2010 and subsequently presented in London and Warsaw. The US premiere was in Houston in January 2014. New York performances at the Drill Hall follow in July.
Meanwhile Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica continue to make the music of Mieczysław Weinberg a focus of their international touring repertoire.

Latvian-born master violinist Gidon Kremer founded Kremerata Baltica in 1997 to foster outstanding young musicians from Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, the three Baltic States.

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica SOFIA GUBAIDULINA Canticle of the Sun

Sofia Gubaidulina’s 80th birthday in October 2011 generated much press coverage around the world, appropriately stressing the uniqueness and the variety of her compositional approaches. Both are in evidence on these recordings from Lockenhaus. Gidon Kremer is the soloist and Kremerata Baltica the ensemble on the premiere recording of “The Lyre of Orpheus”, dedicated to the memory of Gubaidulina’s daughter. Kremer has long been a committed advocate of Gubaidulina’s work, and the composer has praised the way the violinist seems to unleash music from the soul. In this work of austere beauty and raw lyricism, violin, string orchestra and percussion intermingle in new ways. At a subterranean level, the piece is also an exploration into acoustic phenomena and the physics of sound, with pulsating difference tones part of its underlying structures. “The Lyre of Orpheus” was recorded in 2006, a month after Kremer gave the first performance.

“Canticle of the Sun”, recorded in 2010, revisits the celebrated piece that Gubaiduilina wrote in tribute to Mstislav Rostropovich on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1997. Rostropovich’s famously sunny disposition was an inspiration, by association prompting Gubaidulina to set St Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun” for choir. In this recording, Nicolas Altstaedt, one of the most accomplished cellists of his generation, takes on the highly expressive lead role. A further, timely, Lockenhaus connection here: as of this year, Altsteadt takes over from Kremer as the new director of the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival.