This is a fabulous recital, the sort that suggests wet ink on the page and performances born more of impulse than of duty. The Enescu sequence is pure delight, from the gipsy-like cadences of the unaccompanied “Minstrel” that opens the suite, through the virtual-reality chirruping of “The bird in the cage and the cuckoo on the wall”, to the ingenious ‘linking’ miniatures – half a minute apiece or less – that etch a cricket and “Wind in the chimney”. Impressions d’enfance (1940) ends with an extraordinarily graphic “Sunrise”. The idiom straddles late Debussy and mature Bartok, though Enescu’s characteristically Romanian flavouring soon gives the game away. Kremer’s performances are agile, lean and impetuous, with copious slides and numerous flushes of warmth. Furthermore, he carries the camp-fire element into the Bartok, rhapsodizing rapturously over the final climax and effecting a magical diminuendo towards the sonata’s close. Maisenberg commands a multi-shaded tonal palette and it’s a delight to encounter a work that can be – in unsympathetic hands – a listening trial transformed into a sort of cerebral Hungarian rhapsody. Again, agility is a keyword.
Which leaves Ervin Schulhoff’s outspoken Second Violin Sonata, a product of 1927, touched by Hindemith’s influence in the first movement, and by heated emotions in the second. Kremer and Maisenberg give it showcase treatment and the recording is, as elsewhere, first-rate. There is an encore, too, taken from Gidon Kremer’s CD “From My Home” (due later this year), a pair of folky, heavily double-stopped Grasshopper Dances by Peteris Plakidis. They are unaccompanied, so Kremer ends the recital as he began it, alone.'