Various Composers - Out of Russia (Gidon Kremer; Christoph Eschenbach)

Information

• (01) Igor Stravinsky - Pastorale for Violin and Wind Quartet
• (02) Alfred Schnittke - Violin Concerto No. 4
• (06) Arthur Lourié - The Blackmore of Peter the Great
• (17) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - The Sleeping Beauty (arr. Stravinsky)
• (19) Arthur Lourié - Funeral Games in Honor of Chronos

Gidon Kremer, violin (1-5)

Philharmonia Orchestra

Christoph Eschenbach, conductor

Date: 1997

Label: Teldec (Warner Classics)

https://www.warnerclassics.com/release/out-of-russia

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Review

I suppose the point of this intriguing, admirably performed anthology is that all the music refers in some way to the composers’ attitudes to Russia, but the quite inadequate notes (strong on design and typography, weak on information) make it hard to pursue the point very far. Schnittke’s Fourth Violin Concerto has a brief paragraph from the composer and an admiring if rather general couple of lines from the soloist, but Arthur Lourie’s two pieces are accompanied by no more than a brief description of his appearance and a fragment of a grumbling letter from Lourie to Anna Akhmatova. Some indication of the plot of his opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great would have been a help; so would a note on why he entitled his curious sequence of quiet rituals for piano, three flutes and cymbals Funeral Games in Honour of Chronos.

Schnittke’s concerto is highly characteristic of him. His own musical initials and those of Gidon Kremer (and of Sofia Gubaidulina, Edison Denisov and Arvo Part) are transformed into a sort of bell-like motto – bell sounds are another link between most of the pieces here – that soon introduces a rather Brahmsian snatch of chorale. Both these ideas recur throughout the work, often fiercely attacked. There is a tension between these violent assaults and the virtuoso rhetoric of the soloist, but this too at times breaks down, especially in two passages which Schnittke terms “cadenza visuale”. Here the soloist’s figuration degenerates into mere toneless gesturing (supplemented for the purpose of recording with desperate grunts and struggles for breath). In the third movement an anxious, quasi-Bachian cantabile is soon shown up as false after an unstable duet with a solo cello and a momentary transformation into a deranged Russian dance. It could be read as a distressingly nihilist piece, but the ghosts of Schnittke’s ‘kindred spirits’ still walk, palely benevolent, at the end.

Lourie’s pieces are baffling. Both are very fragmentary, the 22-minute operatic suite running to 12 movements, several of them decidedly disjointed, the 10-minute Funeral Games sounding like a suite of tiny miniatures. The music is mostly hushed, brooding or unquiet, sometimes minimal in resources and sometimes with an emaciated grace that sounds, especially with two movements from The Sleeping Beauty placed between Lourie’s scores, like a desiccated residue of Tchaikovsky. More than that it is hard to say without greater knowledge of the music’s context. Like everything here, though, Lourie’s pieces are finely played and admirably recorded.

-- Gramophone

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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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Christoph Eschenbach (born February 20, 1940) is a German-born pianist and conductor. He studied conducting with George Szell, and also counted Herbert von Karajan as a mentor. Eschenbach has been chief conductor and music director of the orchestras such as the NDR Symphony, Orchestre de Paris, the Houston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra. In November 2017, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin announced the appointment of Eschenbach as its next chief conductor. He has made more than 80 recordings as piano soloist, conductor, or both.

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

http://www.christoph-eschenbach.com/

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