COMPOSERS: Auerbach,Nyman,Part,Pelécis,Piazzolla,Raminta ≤erk≥nyt,Schnittke,Schubert,Schumann,Shostakovich,Sibelius,Tickmayer
LABELS: Nonesuch
WORKS: Violin works by Auerbach, Nyman, Pärt, Pelecis, Piazzolla, Schubert, Schnittke, Schumann, Raminta ≤erk≥nyt, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Tickmayer
PERFORMER: Gidon Kremer (violin); Kremerata Baltica
CATALOGUE NO: PRO 400123
In their very different ways both these releases (see ECM 476 3912) typify Gidon Kremer’s extraordinarily eclectic outlook, which delights in juxtaposing works that appear at first glance to have little connection with each other.
There are equally unexpected stylistic disparities in the warmly recorded Nonesuch release. Here Bach, Schubert, Schumann and Sibelius rub shoulders with Lera Auerbach, Raminta Serkšnyte, Schnittke, Pärt and Piazzolla. But I think the programme has greater inner logic whilst offering much that is stimulating, provocative and deeply moving.
Kremer inspires his players to deliver hauntingly beautiful accounts of Sibelius’s Scene with Cranes, the Adagio from Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth and Piazzolla’s mellifluous Canto de Octubre. However the real highlights are the two extended concertante works for violin and orchestra by Lithuanian composer Šerkšnyte and the Russian born Auerbach.
Both composers operate within similar musical parameters exploring an emotionally intense post-modernist language that accommodates high levels of dissonances as well as passages of more conventional tonality with equal conviction.
The ingenious allusions to Pergolesi, which forms the thematic framework for Auerbach’s Sogno di Stabat Mater, are particularly striking and are projected here with blazing commitment by Kremer and his outstanding orchestra. Erik Levi