Gidon Kremer performing at his 2008 Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival (photograph by Guus Krol, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
This coming November 12, Warner Classics will release a 21-CD box set entitled Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection. This will provide a complete account of recordings that Kremer made on three labels that are now Warner “properties,” Teldec, EMI Classics, and Erato. However, the bulk of the Kremer discography can be found on the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) label, which celebrated his 70th birthday (February 27, 2017) with a 22-CD box set of the concerto recordings he had made for that label. (ECM also marked the occasion, since that label is the “home” for recordings by Kremer’s chamber ensemble, Kremerata Baltica; and it has served as his platform for introducing many listeners to the music of Mieczysław Weinberg.)
Having already written about Kremer’s “Weinberg connection,” I decided that, by way of preparation for the Warner release, I would familiarize myself with the DG concerto collection. While this is not a new release, I feel that the context would be valuable; and I shall take the usual “piecemeal” approach to accounting for these recordings. Roughly half of that collection is devoted to twentieth-century music. The nineteenth-century offerings are more modest. The earlier composers can then be assembled in a single group: Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert. My account will be chronological, beginning with the grouping of those five composers.
Mozart is given the most attention with two CDs that account for all five of the violin concertos as well as the K. 364 sinfonia concertante in E-flat major. The violist for that performance is Kim Kashkashian, who will probably be familiar to followers of ECM releases. There are single CDs for both Beethoven (the Opus 61 violin concerto in D major) and Schubert (primarily short works taken from the D. 89 collection of minuets and the D. 90 collection of German dances); and they share a CD which is also devoted to relatively short compositions.
As probably expected, the Vivaldi CD consists primarily of the “four seasons” concertos, along with one other violin concerto, RV 582 in D major, given the title “Per la Santissima Assuzione di Maria Vergine” (for the most holy Assumption of the Virgin Mary). In addition, Kremer is joined by oboist Heinz Holliger for a performance of RV 576 in G minor, which was dedicated to Augustus II the Strong, the Prince Elector of Saxony. Holliger also served as conductor for both RV 576 and RV 582. The Bach CD has all three of the violin concertos, with Kremer recording both parts of the BWV 1043 concerto for two violins in D minor. Holliger is also present on this album with a performance of the BWV 1060R concerto for oboe and violin in C minor.
The Mozart performances were recorded with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Harnoncourt was an early champion of historically informed performances, having founded the Concentus Musicus Wien in the Fifties. These recordings were made in the Eighties, by which time Harnoncourt had expanded his repertoire to music from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, while the instrumentation may not be “historically informed,” there is no questioning that the spirit of the music has been honored. Most of the cadenza’s have been provided by musicologist (and Mozart expert) Robert Levin with Kremer himself providing the “bridge music” leading to the third movements of K. 211 (the second concerto in D major) and K. 216 (the third concerto in G major).
Most of the other recordings were made in London, with the major share going to the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Unless I am mistaken, Neville Mariner appears only for the Beethoven concerto in this particular selection of CDs. However, this recording is primarily distinguished for the cadenzas, which were composed by Alfred Schnittke. Kremer was very much a champion of Schnittke’s work, and his own compositions received considerable attention in this collection. The Beethoven cadenzas are, to say the least, eyebrow-raising, suggesting that Schnittke was trying to situate Beethoven is the broader context of music history. My own first experience of the cadenza for the first movement was jaw-dropping. Decades have elapsed since that “first contact;” and I still cannot get enough of those cadenzas.
Where Bach is concerned, Kremer is far from the first to have recorded both of the solo parts for BWV 1043. My guess is that Bach’s spirit would have been miffed by any of those recordings, since he was clearly more interested in the immediacy of performance. On the other hand, if that spirit has really been following all the ways in which Bach’s music has been performed, I suspect that this duo recording by Kremer (as well as the one made by Jascha Heifetz) has been far less annoying than its encounter with Switched-On Bach! Basically, Kremer’s approaches to both Bach and Vivaldi are consistently credible; and I have no difficult taking them on their own terms.
The one outlier in this collection is Schubert. The closest he ever came to composing a violin concerto was the single-movement D. 345 in D major. All the other brief selections do not count as concertos. Nevertheless, they make for engaging listening. As we shall see in examining the remaining CDs in this collection, the Schubert offerings are far from the only tracks that do not really count as “concerto recordings.”
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