Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica, Vida Miknevičiūtė – Songs of Fate (2024) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica, Vida Miknevičiūtė – Songs of Fate (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:29 minutes | 954 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM New Series

“Gidon Kremer has perhaps never before revealed himself as intimately and as existentially focused as on this recording”, observes Wolfgang Sandner in his liner note accompanying the Latvian violinist’s album Songs of Fate. Together with his Kremerata Baltica chamber ensemble and soprano Vida Mikneviciute, Kremer approaches scores by Baltic composers Raminta Serksnyte, Giedrius Kuprevicius, Jekabs Jancevskis and the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg. In a performer’s note, Kremer explains how, reflecting on the different threads that create the fabric of this programme, “I realise – to my own surprise – that in many ways, this project revolves around the notion of ‘Jewishness’.”

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Anna Vinnitskaya, Kremerata Baltica – Shostakovich: Piano Concertos (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Anna Vinnitskaya, Kremerata Baltica – Shostakovich: Piano Concertos (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 49:49 minutes | 450 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

‘When I performed the Second Piano Concerto for the first time at the age of eleven, his music seemed very optimistic to me. Only later did I understand everything else that is concealed behind the “façade” of Shostakovich’s music.’
The Russian pianist reveals two facets of the composer’s music on this disc by juxtaposing the First Piano Concerto in C minor op. 35, an ‘insolent’ composition with a kaleidoscope of atmospheres and stylistic registers (Russian Romanticism, American jazz, neoclassicism) that constantly surprise the listener, and the more traditional Concerto in F major, which radiates youthful high spirits.

A pupil of Sergey Ossipenko at the Serge Rachmaninoff Conservatory, then of the great Evgeni Koroliov at the Musikhochschule in Hamburg, Anna Vinnitskaya won the Leonard Bernstein Prize, but it was her First Prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2007 that launched her career. For this recording, Anna Vinnitskaya is surrounded by partners of the front rank: the famous Kremerata Baltica, regarded as one of the most creative ensembles on today’s musical scene, and the prestigious wind players of the Staatskapelle Dresden.

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Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica – New Seasons (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica – New Seasons (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:17:43 minutes | 2,51 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Gidon Kremer returns to the Yellow label after more than a decade with the brand new reference recording of Philip Glass’ Second Violin Concerto – “The American Seasons”, hs first solo concerto album in many years.The first Glass Violin Concerto, performed by Kremer and released by DG in 1993, has achieved cult status and shipped close to 90k units (in Germany alone over 25k copies) – and has become a staple of DG’s contemporary music catalogue.

Now, this extraordinary follow-up Concerto is at the heart of the repertoire of the Kremerata Baltica. Performed for the first time in San José, Costa Rica with Gidon Kremer as soloist in August 2013, it will be toured later in the year – info to follow shortly.

The album is completed by works of Arvo Pärt and Giya Kancheli – two composers both closely associated with Gidon Kremer, and who are both set to celebrate milestone 80th birthdays this year. Gidon has also added the short piece by the well-known Japanese film composer Shigeru Umebayashi as a tribute to his Japanese friends.

Four highly regarded visual artists and film maker have created four different films for each of the American Seasons that are projected to screens during concert performances.

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Mario Brunello, Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica – Searching for Ludwig (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Mario Brunello, Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica – Searching for Ludwig (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:27:43 minutes | 855 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

Gidon Kremer and Mario Brunello pay tribute to Beethoven by presenting two of his most famous quartets in a version for string orchestra played by Kremerata Baltica. The ensemble’s founder Gidon Kremer directs Op.131 from the violin, while Mario Brunello conducts Op.135 and adds two contemporary pieces, one by Léo Ferré, “the revolutionary, anarchic, inspired singer-songwriter and great lover of Beethoven”: Muss es sein? Es muss sein! ; Kremerata Baltica performs this hymn to “free music” in a version arranged by Valter Sivilotti for cello, strings and percussion with Leo Ferré’s original voice.

Note sconte means “hidden notes” in Venetian dialect. Franco Rossi, the legendary cellist of the Quartetto italiano, always invited his students, including Mario Brunello, to look for and give importance to the “note sconte” in the scores of string quartets. He asked Giovanni Sollima to write a piece in memory of Franco Rossi, of his great passion for Beethoven and his note sconte’.

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Kremerata Baltica & Gidon Kremer – Mieczysław Weinberg (Live In Lockenhaus & Neuhardenberg / 2012 & 2013) (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Kremerata Baltica & Gidon Kremer – Mieczysław Weinberg (Live In Lockenhaus & Neuhardenberg / 2012 & 2013) (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:41:24 minutes | 1,59 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

The music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg is finally beginning to get the hearing it has long deserved. Weinberg’s lifetime spanned the 20th century: born 1919 in Warsaw, he died 1996 in Moscow, in semi-obscurity. Along the way, his allies and supporters had included Dmitri Shostakovich, who considered him one of the great composers of the age.

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Kremerata Baltica & Gidon Kremer – Mieczysław Weinberg: Chamber Symphonies, Piano Quintet (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Kremerata Baltica & Gidon Kremer – Mieczysław Weinberg: Chamber Symphonies, Piano Quintet (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:39:12 minutes | 1,98 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM New Series

This double album, recorded in Vienna and in Riga in June 2015, includes all four of the chamber symphonies written in the last decade of Polish-born Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg’s life, plus a beautiful new arrangement – by Gidon Kremer and Kremerata percussionist Andrey Pushkarev – of the early Piano Quintet of 1944, heard here in a premiere recording. It is a recording which underlines the importance and originality of Weinberg’s music. For Gidon Kremer, “Weinberg has become a source of unlimited inspiration. No other composer has entered my own and Kremerata Baltica’s repertoire and program concepts with such intensity.” Weinberg’s chamber symphonies are Kremer says, “the most personal reflections of a great composer on his own life and his generation, like a diary of the most dramatic period of the 20th century.” This new recording – the second Kremerata Baltica album dedicated to Weinberg – is, Kremer feels, “the most valuable landmark in the orchestra’s discography since its birth.”

It is released in time for a major tour celebrating both Kremerata Baltica’s 20th anniversary and leader Gidon Kremer’s 70th birthday. The booklet includes liner notes by Weinberg biographer David Fanning, as well as a personal recollection of the composer by Alexander Raskatov.

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Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica – New Seasons (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica – New Seasons (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:17:43 minutes | 2,51 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Gidon Kremer returns to the Yellow label after more than a decade with the brand new reference recording of Philip Glass Second Violin Concerto The American Seasons. The album also features works of Arvo Pärt and Giya Kancheli two composers both closely associated with Gidon Kremer, and who are both set to celebrate milestone 80th birthdays this year. Gidon has added the short piece by the well-known Japanese film composer Shigeru Umebayashi as a tribute to his Japanese friends.

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Gidon Kremer and KremerATA Baltica – ppp (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Gidon Kremer and KremerATA Baltica – ppp (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:21 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © SKANI

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