★★★★★
In the booklet to this CD, we find the following words written by composer Arvo Pärt:"Music must be given the chance to express itself. Words confine music. And then, music makes itself dependent on words. In my view, the very existence of music is jeopardized by today's society's obsession with communication." I am moved by Pärt's comments and feel the truth in them; we say and write too much and hear too little...
- www.classical.net
2009-06-06
★★★★★
This playful CD flirts with depth but, in the end, skips away in favor of cleverness and games. It seems that not even Gidon Kremer knew quite what to make of it all. It works best as a game of associations, "six degrees of separation" interpreted musically. Peter Heidrich (b. 1935) has written variations on Happy Birthday in the style of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and Dvo?ák...
- www.classical.net
2009-06-06
★★★★★
What's next, an album titled "Dyspepsia"? Actually, there's already a connection between music and insomnia - think of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations, which were written to sweeten the sleepless nights of a nobleman. If you're going to lie awake during the wee hours, you might as well as have something to entertain you. Lullabies might be too mocking, but a program of music that is quiet but not sedative might be just the thing...
- www.classical.net
2009-06-06
★★★★★
I've been reading, lately, that postmodernism is dead, but CDs such as this one show that its burial is a little premature. It's a compilation of two night-themed serenades by Mozart, a "toy symphony" by his father, and three Mozart-inspired works by composers from the former Soviet Union. Gidon Kremer calls it an attempt "to set Mozart in the frame of our own time...
- www.classical.net
2009-06-06
★★★★★
No matter how brilliantly played, how beautifully recorded, how enthusiastically performed, a disc of joke encores is still a disc of joke encores. No one could complain that the KREMERata BALTICA is a less than superb chamber orchestra or that Gidon Kremer is less than a spectacular violinist or that Nonesuch has not given Kremer and the KREMERata stunning sound. No one could complain that the pieces are not fun and funny and sometimes a little touching...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
Despite the deceptive titling format on the CD, this is a CD by Latvian violinist Gidon Kramer, not featuring the playing of Astor Piazzolla. All but four of the songs on the album are compositions by Piazzolla, but performed by Kremer and his group, along with Piazzolla's guitarists Sergio and Odair Assad. The album is definitely in tribute to the leader of the nuevo tango, as the lengthy liner notes describe in three languages...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer's 1999 release Eight Seasons is a conceptual masterwork. Kremer, long known for his skillful interpretations of Astor Piazzolla's Argentinean tangos, had the brilliant idea of matching four of the Latin master's tone poems of the seasons in his native Buenos Aires with Antonio Vivaldi's conceptually similar masterpiece "The Four Seasons," alternating seasons between the two works. Besides the conceptual perfection of the idea, the performances are exquisite...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
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