Arthur Lourié - Concerto da Camera; etc. (Gidon Kremer)

Information

Composer: Arthur Lourié

• (01) A Little Chamber Music
• (02) Little Gidding
• (06) Concerto da Camera

Gidon Kremer, violin

Kenneth Riegel, tenor

Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen

Date: 1993

Label: Deutsche Grammophon

https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/lourie-concerto-da-camera-kremer-2293

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Review

The accompanying notes describe Arthur Lourie (1892-1966) as one of the 'great unknowns' of twentieth-century music. Even if he were quite a small unknown a recording of his music would be welcome, since he was certainly one of the century's most intriguing eminences grises. In Russia before the Easter Revolution he was a futurist, an early exponent of graphic notation and a proto-serialist. In the modernist phase immediately post-Revolution he became one of Lunacharsky's cultural commissars, charged with reorganizing the conservatoires, but he failed to return to Russia after a trip to Western Europe in 1922 and made his home in Paris (his family were of French extraction). There he sufficiently impressed Stravinsky to be made his musical assistant and polemicist-in-chief. Born into a Jewish family, Lourie became a Roman Catholic convert while still in Russia (he is said to have influenced Stravinsky's religious views) and wrote music inspired by Gregorian chant. After his emigration to America in 1941, not long after his estrangement from Stravinsky (the booklet ascribes this to his growing antipathy to modernism; Stravinsky's subsequent musical assistant Robert Craft says that Lourie indulged in malicious gossip about Vera Stravinsky) he seems to have sunk into relative obscurity, but not to have ceased composing.

A Little Chamber Music, the first work Lourie wrote in the West, has a rather heavy neo-classicism that already betrays his closeness to Stravinsky, but it is also unexpectedly Shostakovich-like in its irony. A reference to the Dies irae undercuts any expectation of Parisian flippancy; a solemn chorale develops; the music returns to its starting point. Odd, disjointed, but interesting. The Concerto da camera, 20 years later and from Lourie's American years, is odd too: a six-movement, somewhat neo-baroque concerto that only behaves as concertos should in the finale; in the earlier moments the soloist is heard first alone, then with each group of strings separately. It is disjointed again, but now rather like Schnittke in its only partly ironic juxtapositions. There is a clever juggling with short motives that at one point hints at minimalism (Lourie is said to have invented that too in his Russian youth) but there are longer, stronger melodic lines as well, and they take over entirely in the impassioned, elegiac finale. The roughly contemporary setting of extracts from T. S. Eliot's ''Little Gidding'' was written not long after the poem was published, and indicates how rapidly Lourie recognized a kindred spirit in the Christian conservative Eliot. The poet might have preferred Lourie's flame- and fluttering-wing-evoking treatment of the lines beginning ''The dove descending breaks the air'' to Stravinsky's more ascetic anthem, written 14 years later. There are echoes of Stravinsky's more lyrical neo-classicism but I was rather more often reminded of Samuel Barber's Kierkegaard settings, at least in Lourie's careful word-setting and his identification with a text that is austere but rich in images. Not a 'great' unknown, perhaps, but a curiously fascinating one. The performances could hardly be bettered—Kremer is in his glint-eyed, button-holing, genius-discovering mood, Riegel in excellent voice—and the recording is first-class.

-- Michael Oliver, Gramophone

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Arthur Lourié (14 May 1892 – 12 October 1966) was a significant Russian composer. He was partly self-taught, but also studied composition with Glazunov at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Lourié played an important role in the earliest stages of the organization of Soviet music after the 1917 Revolution, but later went into exile in Paris (1922) then New York (1940). From 1924 to 1931 he was one of Stravinsky's most important champions. A man of very wide culture, he set poems of Sappho, Pushkin, Heine, Verlaine, Blok, Mayakovsky, Dante, classical Latin and medieval French poets. He was also a talented painter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Lourié

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Gidon Kremer (born 27 February 1947 in Riga) is a Latvian classical violinist, artistic director, and founder of Kremerata Baltica. He studied with Voldemar Sturestep at the Riga School of Music, and from 1965 with David Oistrakh at the Moscow Conservatory. Kremer won first prize at the Paganini Competition and International Tchaikovsky Competition, among others. Composers such as Gubaidulina, Nono and Schnittke have dedicated works to him. He has a large discography on the Deutsche Grammophon label, for which he has recorded since 1978. He has also recorded for Philips, EMI, Decca, ECM and Nonesuch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gidon_Kremer
http://www.gidonkremer.net

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