Classical Perspectives:

Gidon Kremer's De Profundis
‘Dedicated to all those who refuse to be silenced…’

The cover image for Grammy Award-winning violinist Gidon Kremer's De Profundis is drawn from a powerful series of photographs called ‘Soul Of Fuel’ by Alexandrea Kremer-Khomassouridze that hauntingly depicts the places where oil deposits lie beneath the surface and the often ravaged-looking industrial plants in the former Soviet Union where oil is processed.

by David McGee

It opens so quietly, so soothingly, as to be deceptive. Is that music we’re hearing? Or someone breathing?

In fact, it is both. Thus the opening measures of Jean Sibelius’s “Scene With Cranes” and the deceptive beckoning into Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer’s masterwork, De Profundis, released last month by Nonesuch. Once in, expect an exhilarating journey. Kremer and his Kremerata Baltic—the chamber orchestra he assembled in 1997 by drawing upon the rich talent pool of young musicians from the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania—proceed with bracing energy and gripping intensity through a dozen seemingly eclectic but thematically synchronous compositions. The selections, chosen from Mr. Kremer’s performance repertoire, range from works by familiar, towering composers such as Robert Schumann (“Fugue No. 6 from Six Fugues on the Name B.A.C.H.”), Franz Schubert (“Minuet No. 3 and Trios in D minor, D. 89”) and Dimitri Shostakovich (“Adagio [from Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District”]) to compositions from contemporary composers on the order of Arvo Pärt (“Passacaglia”) and Raminta Serksnyte (the title piece). Of course, there is also some sensual heat supplied by yet another of Mr. Kremer’s interpretations of a work by one of his favorite artists, one whom he covers often, the Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla (“Melodie en Le menor [Canto de Octubre]”). Throughout, the music is played with vigor appropriate to a life affirming conceptual conceit and solemnity warranted by the overarching spirituality and sense of ethical conflict and moral outrage informing the individual pieces.

Stimulating though its music be, De Profundis is, in the vernacular of an earlier time, heavy. A broadside against a world Mr. Kremer sees as being destroyed by, in his own words, “greed, corruption and false prophets,” De Profundis achieves a cathartic breakthrough in the sheer vitality of its refusal to bow down to but rather to stand forthright against the strangling moral darkness enveloping the land.

Gidon Kremer’s incisive liner essay sets the stage for what’s to come and provides the essential social context for understanding the greater import of the music he chose for its specific social message:

“Out of the depths I cry to you.” Countless poets and musicians have used these timeless words from Psalm 130. I feel they are especially urgent in our time, when the world is afflicted with greed, corruption, and false prophets. Today, oil is a highly desirable commodity. It is a hidden substance extracted from the depths of the Earth that can both sustain and destroy life. Music is likewise a fuel. Fuel for the soul.
Far more precious than oil, it is felt in the impenetrable depths of our consciousness. Can oil and music mix? In a positive sense, both are sources of energy that can serve the people.

But in today’s world, oil is also used to sustain tyrannical regimes, be it in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Myanmar, or Russia. Despite painting themselves as advocates of democracy, their rulers engage in a Soviet-style suppression of free speech, the show trials, and presumption of guilt. In these Orwellian states, everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.

Drunk on oil, the worshippers of the golden calf seek to silence opposition and build walls between peoples and states. Contrary to that, we, the worshippers of Art, believe it is our duty to build bridges and to stand up in support of those who are trying to establish a more democratic society, those who are fighting for transparency and truth. Therefore, I would like to dedicate De Profundis to all those who refuse to be silenced, who understand that real freedom is within us.

Yet my intention is not to make De Profundis a political statement, for politics represents only the surface of things, while the artists featured on this record affirm a deep-rooted personal expression that can resonate within anyone. For music, unlike authoritarian rulers, speaks with an outstretched hand, not with a clenched fist. It is an offering to the listener, and its profundity can only be established on the basis of service, not on the grounds of self-indulgence or meaningless stardom.

So, “out of the depths,” these artists cry out for a better world, one that is not dominated by the superficiality of sales, figures, ratings, self-promotion, and “small talk.” Their spiritual mission, like oil, can sustain humans by appealing to their profoundest emotions, by letting them open up, become more conscious, rather than “forget themselves.” Each of the twelve pieces selected for this album sends its own individual message to the listener, one that my colleagues from Kremerata Baltica and I have tried to illuminate. Now it is up to you, dear listener, to allow this message to fuel your soul. —Gidon Kremer (March 2010)

I would like to dedicate this CD to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a true Russian patriot, who has endured years of imprisonment in Siberia under false pretenses. Accused of stealing oil and evading taxes, Mikhail has in truth worked to make his home country a better place. His unfair trial and continued incarceration are important political symbols to all those who strive for a free and democratic Russia.

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'Perfect Isn't Good Enough'
Thirty years ago Gidon Kremer was rated as one of the world's outstanding violinists. Then he really started making waves.

By Charlotte Higgins

[Ed. Note: interviews with Gidon Kremer are fairly rare. One of the best online is from 2000, courtesy The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins, who offers both biography and critical insight in her chat with the artist.]

Gidon Kremer has pale but piercing eyes. Or rather, his eyes, gazing out from behind neat, wire-framed specs, do not so much pierce as seem to pin you against the wall. The Latvian violinist is very intense, and does not laugh very much. He is also tired. He got up at three in the morning to catch a plane to London from his home in Paris for a two-hour rehearsal. In an hour or so he will take another plane to Milan.

"I am thinking about my young daughter who is seven, and who plays the piano," he says. "I don't know if I want her to lead such a hard life as I do. I wouldn't wish a day like this on anyone." But this hard life has a good side, for us at least. Without Kremer, many music-lovers might never have heard of two great 20th-century composers—Alfred Schnittke and Astor Piazzolla.

Born in 1947 in Riga, Kremer grew up in Latvia before moving to Moscow to study under the violinist David Oistrakh. He was the child of violinists, both of whom had their careers blown to the winds by the second World War. His Jewish father survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Riga cellar for two years, and the young Kremer was groomed to fulfill his father's frustrated ambitions. That was not his only burden. "Growing up in a totalitarian regime, I also had to endure the pressure of the state ideology. It was hard, trying to be a free artist."

Nevertheless, Kremer flourished musically, winning numerous prizes. The most important was the 1970 Tchaikovsky competition, where conductor Herbert von Karajan was moved to call him "the greatest violinist in the world.” For the next 10 years, until he finally left the Soviet Union, Kremer struggled against the regime, risking his career promoting the music of seriously out-of-favor composers—Schnittke and Arvo Part among them.

Gidon Kremer and the English Chamber Orchestra, Vivaldi, Spring (I. Allegro)

"If you wanted to perform music that you loved and believed in but was not written in a socialist-realist style, you got into trouble," he says. "Schnittke's music was not forbidden but there were very few artists willing to risk their careers to present it. It took some efforts." Schnittke's fourth and last violin concerto, written in 1984, was dedicated to Kremer. The composer and violinist's initials, translated into musical notation, formed a framework for much of the work.

One of Kremer's other great enthusiasms, the work of the Argentine Astor Piazzolla, has led to his recording six CDs of the composer's music over the past four years. Piazzolla, who studied composition in Paris under Nadia Boulanger, and returned to Buenos Aires to breathe new life into the tango, died in 1992 little known outside South America. Now he is intensely fashionable; performances of his heady, complex tangos proliferate.

Though Kremer does not shy away from the traditional repertoire—he was in London to rehearse the Sibelius concerto—his sense of adventure is at the heart of his identity as a performer. He is an explorer on the borders of the known musical world. "For me it would be too boring to play music by only dead composers or to present music as if it were in a waxworks museum," he says. "I don't want music to be a matter of comfort but of expansion of the spirit."

Kremer's interpretations of Piazzolla have been criticized for being too coolly postmodern and tame, for not reeking strongly enough of the sweat and smoke and sex of the world of tango. Maybe so, but Kremer will never give his audience an easy ride. He can produce sounds as soft and creamy as fresh butter, then jolt you with crash landings and emergency stops. His violin does not merely sing; it strains and rasps and rattles and groans. "One of my favorite conductors, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, says, 'Don't strive for perfection, because perfection is in conflict with beauty.' I would say that my role is to deliver something of beauty. Not ordinary stuff. Not something that is merely perfect."

Does he agree that he plays at the very limits of his physical ability? "Being on the edge, being on the border, being extreme—this is correct," he replies. "I know so many colleagues who deliver great performances on the scale of technique. But very often behind it there is an empty message, or no message at all."

Gidon Kremer, ‘Historie Du Tango, Café 1930 (Astor Piazzolla)

Just as Kremer's playing occasionally strains, so too do his words. You feel that his mind is roaming free and that language—or at least English—cannot quite contain it. But then Kremer, who has lost his childhood fluency in Latvian but speaks Russian, English, German and French, believes that music is also a language, and one that can express emotion in its rawest form.

This is crucial when it comes to selecting repertoire. It attracted him to Schnittke and Part, and more recently to the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli. He talks about music with a "human heart.” "This is what drew me to Piazzolla," he says. "He has the same sense of beauty and nostalgia that Schubert had." It is typical of the connections that Kremer makes that he should talk of a 19th-century Austrian and a 20th-century Argentine as if they were contemporaries, even friends. "I am attached to music that speaks to you and does not just manipulate your sophistication. The point is not only to say something unheard of before but to say it in a language of emotion. Music can be a mirror of ourselves. It offers us the opportunity for reflection.

"Occasionally the audience is not aware of the precious things that are presented to them," he says sadly.

In 1997 Kremer set up the Kremerata Baltica, an ensemble of young musicians drawn from the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. This move is not merely musical or personal. "To defend their national identities and to do something good for the music of those countries—this is certainly political," he says. There is a poetic justice to it—after all those years of being identified as a Soviet or Russian violinist, Kremer is staking out a territory of his own.

‘He talks about music with a ‘human heart.’ ‘This is what drew me to Piazzolla,’ he says. ‘He has the same sense of beauty and nostalgia that Schubert had.’’

He works with Kremerata Baltica for about five months of the year. "They are still fresh, still far away from the routine of many orchestras that are really only to do with money-making." One of their recordings, of works by the Latvian Peteris Vasks, contains a note by the composer about his 1991 piece, Balsis. He writes of "the Soviet empire's dying excesses and the peaceful resistance of the Baltic peoples".

This does not mean, however, that Kremer regards Latvia as the place where he belongs. Championing the music and musicians of the Baltic states (he has recently recorded a disc of contemporary Baltic music called From My Home) does not provide "an ID of myself. It is part of my past, and I pay tribute to it, just as I pay tribute to other parts of my past. A big part of my life is to do with Russian culture."

So where is home? "I have lost the sense of home. It is very dispersed, it is very vague. It is here," he says, tapping his head. "It is more the idea of a creative process in which I feel at home. It is an internal landscape. Inside this home I know all my shelves better than I do the ones in Paris. When I return to Paris, I find that my books are not where I thought they were. The shelves of my mind are a little more ordered."

The Guardian, Wednesday 22 November 2000

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Notes and Reviews
By Brian Wise, WQXR.org, New York

The Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer is a noted advocate for the music of Russian and Eastern European composers, as heard in several albums with the Kremerata Baltica, his chamber orchestra of young players from the Baltic states. De Profundis, their latest album together, features nearly two centuries of inward-looking works by a dozen composers, from canonical names (Schubert, Sibelius, Shostakovich) to contemporary ones (Michael Nyman, Arvo Pärt, Raminta Serksnyte). It's this week's Full Rotation.

The booklet for De Profundis contains Kremer's explanation of the album's concept: the opening words of Psalm 130, "De profundis clamavi a te, Domine" ("Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord"), which have a unique relevance in today's world of exploitation and repression. In particular, Kremer explains, the "depths" suggest the world's dependency on oil—both as a source of energy and an impetus for tyrannical regimes.

Driving the point home, the album's cover features an oil-soaked body of water while several pieces suggest environmental or spiritual themes. Sibelius's “Scene with Cranes” is misty and evocative, with the strings spinning an aimless, watery melody. The young Lithuanian composer Raminta Serksnyté supplies his own creepy setting of “De Profundis.” There are also dark reflections on Russian culture: an adagio from Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, an edgy, dissonant fragment by Alfred Schnittke.

Other works strike a mood of introspection and religiosity including the New York-based Russian composer Lera Auerbach's Sogno di Stabat Mater and Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer transcription of Bach's Lasset uns den nicht zerteilen, from the St. John Passion, BWV 245. Graceful pieces by Georgs Pelecis (“Flowering Jasmine”) and Piazzolla (“Melodia en La menor for bandoneón & strings”) lighten the mood and showcase Kremer's crisp but never flashy playing.

The recording is dedicated to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian businessman and philanthropist convicted of fraud and sentenced to a labor camp in Siberia in a case that critics have said is an attempt by Russian leader Vladimir Putin to silence opponents.

WQXR.org website

from Arkiv Music:
The album's 12 pieces, selected from Gidon Kremer's performing repertoire, all hold very special meaning to him, and are connected to each other on a deep, intuitive level.

The composers, whose works span nearly two centuries, are: Jean Sibelius, Arvo Pärt, Raminta Serksnyté (whose piece De Profundis lends the album its title), Robert Schumann, Michael Nyman, Franz Schubert, Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer, Dmitri Shostakovich, Lera Auerbach, Astor Piazzolla, Georgs Pelecis, and Alfred Schnittke.

Kremer explains: "The artists featured on this record affirm a deep-rooted personal expression that can resonate within anyone. Their spiritual missive can sustain humans by appealing to their profoundest emotions, by letting them open up, become more conscious, rather than 'forget themselves.' Each of the 12 pieces selected for this album sends its own individual message to the listener, one that my colleagues from Kremerata Baltica and I have tried to illuminate."

Gidon Kremer dedicates De Profundis to all those who refuse to be silenced, "namely to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who-being a real patriot of Russia-can be seen as a symbol for democratic changes in his home country. Khodorkovsky continues to spend years of imprisonment in Siberia, where he has been sent by a questionable trial." (Arvo Pärt recently dedicated his fourth symphony, “Los Angeles,” to Khodorkovsky as well.)

Kremerata Baltica was founded by Gidon Kremer in 1996 and is composed of a group of young musicians from the three Baltic States. They first performed in the violinist's hometown of Riga, Latvia, in February 1996 and have since toured throughout the world. Kremer, who is the group's artistic director, described the Kremerata Baltica, in an interview with the New York Times, as "a musical democracy ... open-minded, self-critical, a continuation of my musical spirit."

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=513908&album_group=1

Editorial Reviews, amazon.com

The cover image for Grammy Award-winning violinist Gidon Kremer's De Profundis is drawn from a powerful series of photographs called “Soul Of Fuel” by Alexandrea Kremer-Khomassouridze that hauntingly depicts the places where oil deposits lie beneath the surface and the often ravaged-looking industrial plants in the former Soviet Union where oil is processed. All-too-timely thoughts about oil—our appetite for it and the power and taste for tyranny it can convey on those around the world who control it—were on Kremer's mind as he selected this 12-track set, which includes pieces from a wide range of composers representing the 18th to the 21st centuries, from Franz Schubert to Astor Piazzolla, Dimitri Shostakovich to Michael Nyman. To Kremer, the works are linked to each other in a profound spiritual way that is almost indescribable.

De Profundis—its title taken from a 1998 piece by the young Lithuanian composer Raminta Serksnyte featured on the album—is designed to be, as Kremer puts it in his notes, “fuel for the soul,” drawing from a deep artistic and emotional well. The composers, whose works span nearly two centuries, are: Jean Sibelius, Arvo Part, Raminta Serksnyte (whose piece, “De Profundis,” lends the album its title), Robert Schumann, Michael Nyman, Franz Schubert, Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer, Dmitri Shostakovich, Lera Auerbach, Astor Piazzolla, Georgs Pelecis, and Alfred Schnittke. Kremer writes of them, “Out of the depths' these artists cry out for a better world... Their spiritual missive, like oil, can sustain humans by appealing to their profoundest emotions, by letting them open up, 12 pieces selected for this album sends its own individual message to the listener, one that my colleagues from Kremerata Baltica and I have tried to illuminate.”

The album also features the youthful Kremerata Baltica, the chamber ensemble of fellow Latvian musicians he founded. Kremer's 2009 Nonesuch release with Kremerata Baltica was the acclaimed two-disc Mozart: The Complete Violin Concertos, which BBC Music Magazine, in a five-star review, called “an altogether impressive achievement.” The New York Times concurred: “Gidon Kremer's great interpretative strength has always been his ability to make a work, however familiar, entirely his own.”

Kremer and Kremerata Baltica will perform selections from De Profundis on their 2010-11 tour, which will include visits to most major American markets. Regarding the ensemble's interpretative powers, the Los Angeles Times has declared, “They are utterly alive to the possibilities in the scores. They make every detail stand out; they play with an overpowering sense of joy... and they are deep.”

Gidon Kremer’s De Profundis is available at www.amazon.com