Gidon Kremer made a few enemies with his recent indictment of the damaging culture of celebrity at the Verbier Festival. In a letter explaining his withdrawal from the Swiss event, Kremer declared the new breed of performers “quite EMPTY and artistically lost, chasing a hunger for recognition.” Embracing talent over marketability for his own roster, the violinist’s Lockenhaus Festival is a bolster to his argument. Luckily for those unable to attend the annual concerts in Austria, ECM New Series founder Manfred Eicher began capturing the superlative performances soon after the Lockenhaus’s inception in 1981. This essential five-disc box collects material recorded between 1981 and 1986.
Lockenhaus programs are famously chosen in the 11th hour, allowing Kremer to construct compelling and sometimes unusual composer pairings such as CD one’s Richard Strauss and Olivier Messiaen juxtaposition. While both “Metamorphosen” and “Trois petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine” were written in response to WWII, the German’s former stands as a lament for a shattered Munich whereas the Frenchman’s latter gazes heavenward for hope. Strauss’s dubious politics aside, Kremerata Baltica (Kremer’s own ensemble) luminously inhabits the romanticism of the work’s pathos, unafraid to luxuriate in its poignant dissonances.
Those frustrated with the note-by-note editing pervasive in modern classical recordings will appreciate the polish and sweep of these live performances, especially in deep cuts such as André Caplet’s Poe-inspired quartet, “Conte fantastique,” or Erwin Schulhoff’s genre-leaping piano dance, “Cinq Études de Jazz.” Kremer curates a scope as broad as it is conceptually keen.
- Doyle Armbrust
published in Time Out Chicago on October 26th, 2011