Modern-music missionaries couldn’t possible hope for a better promotional tool than this delightful CD. After playing it, I would happily have canvassed any willing passer-by, confident that even the least sophisticated listener would respond to Gidon Kremer’s absorbing programme. And yet there is plenty on offer for sophisticated listeners, too. Part’s Fratres is given one of its finest recordings ever, with tactile solo arpeggios, a bleached-white bed of string chords and plenty of tonal incident later on. Erkki-Sven Tuur’s Conversio for violin and piano opens lightly and restlessly, shifting metre and accents with playful insistence very much a la Reich (in Counterpoint mode) before intensifying, fragmenting and transforming into a bold species of Messiaenic-style bird-song.
Vytautas Barkauskas’s brief, five-movement unaccompanied Partita features a colourful, syncopated scherzo and some strikingly harmonized double-stopped passages. Comparing Kremer’s emotionally charged account of Vasks’s Musica Dolorosa with Dennis Russell Davies’s no less dramatic but rather less heated ECM account which I reviewed in September, underlines the significance of an imaginative programming context. Both discs have one, but while Kremer’s sequence casts beams of light from either end and illuminates the score’s more consolatory elements, Russell Davies’s performance is flanked by the sombre spectres of Shostakovich and Schnittke and therefore wears a far darker countenance. Incidentally, Kremer’s solo cellist, Marc Francoux, makes an especially heartfelt plea for the achingly expressive passage that falls directly after the disruptive central section (at 9'24'').
Both options work – and both demand to be heard. Kremer’s reading gives way to a highly palatable, 27-minute musical journey by Georges Pelecis where the route covers warming counterpoint, Chopinesque cadences, folk-style melodies and telling silences. It is, I suppose, the most obvious ‘crossover’ bridge in the programme, though the Dvarionas Elegie that opens the CD is somewhat shorter and has even more catchy tunes – a sort of Baltic salut d’amour, with Tchaikovsky close to hand. The two gnomic – and highly entertaining – Grasshopper Dances first appeared on Kremer’s absorbing “Impressions d’Enfance” CD (7/97).
A disc such as this virtually amounts to composition in itself, and although responsive to piecemeal listening, works best if heard straight through at a single sitting. And with near-on 80-minutes’ playing time, it strikes me as a pretty absorbing way to spend an evening.'