About this Artist

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Editorial Reviews

Kremerata Baltica turned five in 2002, so if you missed the celebration, here's your party favor. And it's as delightful and quirky a treat as one might expect from such an intelligent musician as Gidon Kremer. Some of these pieces seem silly, like Peter Heidrich's "Happy Birthday" Variations (1994), in which each variation is a piece of stylistic trickery, treating the tune in the manner of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, and also as a polka, a rag, a tango, and a czardas. (There's even a variation "in the style of film music"!) Other choices seem simply odd, like Joseph Ghys and François Servais' Variations on "God Save the King," a piece of 19th-century virtuoso fluff. And what is one to make of the lush, exotic, pop flavor of Vato Kakhidze's "Blitz" Fantasy (1999)? But, as it moves from the ridiculous -- Teddy Bor's McMozart's eine kleine bricht Moonlicht nicht Musik (1981) -- to the sublime -- Tchaikovky's Elegy -- the diverse program somehow hangs together. Of course, it helps that Kremer and his musicians approach each work with equal seriousness, for there's nothing worse than a comic who laughs at his own jokes. But even the silliest of these pieces is extremely well made, and in the end that makes this album worth hearing. And hearing again! Andrew Farach-Colton, Barnes & Noble

Customer Reviews

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