Complete Violin Concertos : Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica (2CD)

Mozart: The Complete Violin Concertos

Gidon Kremer, solo violin and artistic director
Kremerata Baltica

Recorded live in concert at the Salzburg Festival, Haus fur Mozart, Salzburg, August 11, 2006
Recording Producer: Helmut Muhle
Balance Engineer and Tape Editor: Johannes Muller
Assistant Engineer: Lutz Wildner
Mastering Engineer: Christoph Stickel, msm-studios GmbH, Munich

Following the Grammy Award-winning Latvian violinist's performance of the complete Mozart violin concertos at Lincoln Center's 2006 Mostly Mozart Festival, the New York Times declared: "Gidon Kremer's great interpretive strength has always been his ability to make a work, however familiar, entirely his own, dissimilar in most important details from the way other violinists play it, yet fully within both the spirit and letter of the score."

This new two-disc set, with historical liner notes by critic and musicologist Michael Steinberg, presents Kremer and Kremerata Baltica, his touring ensemble of young musicians from the Baltic States, in a performance of Mozart's five violin concertos, recorded at the Salzburg Festival in Austria two days after his Lincoln Center shows. Said Times critic Allan Koznin of the New York event, "Mr. Kremer's phrasing, in both his solo lines and his direction of the orchestra, avoided the predictable or the metronomic: phrases ebbed and flowed, with sharp accenting and dynamic contrast that kept the music fresh and, in its best moments, surprising. In all five works Mr. Kremer played the concise, stylish cadenzas by Robert Levin, which adhered to the conventions of Mozart's time."

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "You can't ever expect a performance by violinist Gidon Kremer to be staid, or even ordinary. His fertile and original mind, married to phenomenal technique and great musicianship, makes every concert in which he appears a musical adventure." In his Nonesuch career, the 62 year-old Kremer has perhaps most famously explored the repertoire of Astor Piazzolla; in 2003, he released a specially commissioned piece, Russian Seasons, by Ukrainian composer Leonid Desyatnikov, pairing it on disc with an interpretation of Tchaikovsky's 12-part The Seasons. On his 2001 After Mozart, Kremer contrasted Mozart's own work with Mozart-inspired pieces by contemporary Eastern European composers Alexander Raskatov, Valentin Silvestrov, and Alfred Schnittke. ( NONESUCH )