Gidon Kremer on DG: Twentieth Century

My third and final account of the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) 22-CD box set of concerto recordings featuring violinist Gidon Kremer will focus on the twentieth-century repertoire. As I observed, the nineteenth-century share of the albums offered the fewest number of selections. In contrast the twentieth-century share is the largest by a long shot. Very few of the offerings can be classified as “usual suspects;” and some of them involve unexpected and eccentric shifts. In addition, there is a far more extensive account of “non-concerto” selections. Furthermore, in addition to “usual suspects” ensembles and conductors, the twentieth-century performances provide the first opportunities to listen to Kremer’s own chamber orchestra, Kremerata Baltica.

The fact is that, for most listeners, only the first CD in this section is likely to be familiar. It couples Béla Bartók’s first violin concerto with Alban Berg’s only violin concerto. The Bartók concerto is conducted by Pierre Boulez leading the Berlin Philharmonic. The Berg is performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis.

“For the record” Kremer performed the Bartók with the San Francisco Symphony in October of 2015 under the baton of Andrey Boreyko. I had thought that he had played the Berg with Michael Tilson Thomas, but I was unable to confirm that proposition. As a more general fun fact: the Berg was recorded in 1985 and became one of the earliest “Digital Classics” releases on Philips.

Where the overall content of this category is concerned, it is clear that Kremer wanted to get on to more adventurous undertakings. Most important seems to have been his desire to promote the compositions of Alfred Schnittke coupled with a somewhat unconventional perspective on the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. What is interesting about the latter is that there is only one “straight” account of Shostakovich’s music. That is the recording of the Opus 129 (second) violin concerto, performed with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

This selection is coupled with Opus 125, whose recording is a curious hybrid. In the Shostakovich catalog, Opus 125 is a re-orchestration of Robert Schumann’s Opus 129 cello concerto in A minor. Ironically, Schumann himself had prepared the violin part that Kremer played for his recording. More idiosyncratic is the arrangement of Shostakovich’s Opus 134 violin sonata. This was reworked into a concertante performance with the solo violin accompanied by percussion and string orchestra. The arrangement was a joint effort by Michail Zinman and Andrei Pushkarev, the latter being the percussion soloist on the recording. This may also be the earliest recording of Kremerata Baltica.

Schnittke was a tough nut to crack when I first encountered him, primarily through BIS Records, based in Sweden. That was my own “first contact” with that composer’s 1966 (second), which violin concerto, which Kremer recorded with the Sinfonieorchester Basel conducted by Heinz Holliger. I had become curious about the BIS recordings after listening to performances of his string quartets by the Kronos Quartet. There was an almost violent aggression in Schnittke’s rhetoric, and I would later discover that even his capacity for wit often involved dangerously sharp edges. The good news is that Kremer never tries to smooth over any of those sharp edges.

I was struck that Schnittke’s fifth concerto grosso was released on an album with Philip Glass’ first violin concerto. On the DG album Christoph von Dohnányi conducts the Vienna Philharmonic; and placing Glass before Schnittke amounts to a chronological order of the compositions. I was also glad to see that the Kremerata Baltica discography included Glass’ second concerto, which was entitled “The American Four Seasons.”

Conductor Riccardo Chailly and violinist Gidon Kremer on the original vinyl cover of their performance of Darius Milhaud’s “Le Bœuf sur le toit” (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

One of the more unexpected offerings in this collection is a performance of Darius Milhaud’s “Le Bœuf sur le toit” (the ox on the roof), which the composer had envisaged as (in his words) “background to any Charlie Chaplin silent movie.” This was originally scored for small orchestra, but Milhaud subsequently arranged the score for both violin and orchestra and violin and piano. In addition Milhaud’s Les Six colleague Arthur Honegger provided a violin cadenza. Kremer recorded the violin/orchestra version (including the Honegger cadenza) with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. While I was impressed with how Kremer negotiated the Honegger cadenza, I felt that the departure from the original instrumentation diminished many of the amusingly sleazy qualities of the score.

The fact is that the wide diversity of content in this particular segment of the Kremer anthology is likely to evoke an equally wide diversity of reactions. Different listeners may react in different ways, but I doubt that many would buy into the repertoire in its entirety. On the other hand that broad extent says a lot about how music was being made over the last half-century. All of these recordings make for a valuable time-capsule, even if it is not necessarily a consistently engaging one.