Gidon Kremer: Songs of Fate
ECM New Series

Like Keith Jarrett, Gidon Kremer's ECM catalogue is so voluminous, it's easy to take him for granted. Songs of Fate thus serves as a timely reminder of precisely how valuable the violinist's output has been and continues to be. The new set, recorded in Vilnius in 2019 and at the Lockenhaus festival in 2022, features Kremer accompanied by soprano Vida Mikneviciute, vibraphonist Andrei Pushkarev, violoncellist Magdalena Ceple, and his 1997-founded Kremerata Baltica chamber ensemble performing material by Baltic composers Giedrius Kuprevicius, Raminta Šerkšnyte, Jekabs Jancevskis, and the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Premiere recordings of Šerkšnyte's This too shall pass and Jancevskis's Lignum bookend multiple selections by Kuprevicius and Weinberg on the release. If the performances seem particularly resonant, it might be explained, in part, by the fact that the programme's rooted in Kremer's Jewish heritage and his history of living in the Baltic states. Such connections amplify the personal dimension of the project and make for a recording that's by turns intimate and expansive.

While the recording couples composers of almost two generations, Šerkšnyte born in 1975 and Jancevskis 1992, with those of two others, Kuprevicius (b. 1944) and Weinberg (1919-96), there's nothing disjunctive about the impression left by Songs of Fate. That Weinberg was born in Warsaw and the others Lithuania—Kuprevicius and Šerkšnyte in Kaunas and Jancevskis Riga—also imparts no sense of disunity to the recording. Kremer certainly had ample material from which to draw for the set-list. The prolific Weinberg wrote twenty-six symphonies, seventeen string quartets, six concertos, seven operas, twenty-eight sonatas, over 200 songs, and scores for sixty films, theatre productions, and more. Though their output doesn't rival his, Kuprevicius and Šerkšnyte have composed operas, symphonic works, chamber music, and choir works, while Jancevskis' material has been performed by multiple choirs and other ensembles. Kremer, in fact, has presented Weinberg's before, with recordings of his violin sonatas, chamber symphonies, and more included in the violinist's discography.

Comprising thirty-four musicians on this recording (Kremer included), Kremerata Baltica brings a lustrous chamber orchestra dimension to the project. Strings, percussion, and harp offer substantial timbral resources that Mikneviciute, Pushkarev, and Ceple enhance with their contributions. Introducing the release with a performance that's equally time-suspending, ethereal, and spellbinding, Šerkšnyte's This too shall pass establishes the album's oft-poignant tone with Kremer's searing expressivity complemented by the haunting intonations of Pushkarev's vibraphone and the shimmering hush of the string orchestra. The focus then shifts to four pieces by Kuprevicius, the first, “David's Lamentation,” from the chamber symphony The Star of David, elevated by the stirring beauty of Mikneviciute's voice, and the second a gripping duet for Kremer and percussion called Kaddish-Prelude. Accompanied by orchestra, the soprano returns to grace the profoundly elegiac Penultimate Kaddish with her inimitable singing, after which “Postlude. The Luminous Lament,” also from The Star of David, unites Kremer's sighing violin with the vocalist, their pas de deux delicately and movingly conducted.

Six pieces by Weinberg follow, four of them from the composer's Jewish Songs, op. 13. Up first, however, are the entrancing Nocturne, which couples a singing turn by the leader with string orchestra, and the poetic, string quartet-scored Aria, op. 9. Set to texts by the Polish-Jewish poet Yitskhok Leybush Peretz in Yiddish, the songs are illuminated by Mikneviciute's incandescent vocalizing, be it the tranquil gentleness of “Viglid” (Cradle Song) or Mussorgsky-like dramatics of “Oyfn grinem bergele” (On the Green Mountain). As beguiling as Nocturne is Weinberg's Kujawiak when Kremer dances nimbly over a buoyant orchestral backdrop, the celeste-like sprinkle of vibraphone the cherry on top. Songs of Fate concludes with Jancevskis' Lignum, at twelve minutes the album's longest setting and arrestingly scored for string orchestra and chimes. Initially brooding, meditative, and tinged with dissonance, the piece explodes with uplift and affirmation two-thirds of the way through before exiting in a peaceful wave of chimes and soft exhalations.

July 2024