exystence by exy / September 28, 2022 at 11:43AM
Internationally prominent violinist and conductor Gidon Kremer has sometimes championed music from his native Latvia. Of the composers heard here, he has performed and recorded the music of Georgs Pelēcis several times. Here Kremer, with his Kremerata Baltica and more local Kremerata Lettonica, offers an all-Latvian program that has an attractive kind of coherence, and the players seem energetic and fully committed to the music. All three of the composers, whose names all happen to begin with the letter P, have styles rooted in Baltic minimalism, but each inflects the general trend in a different way, with the Ground for Double Bass of Kristaps Pētersons reducing it to essentials. Listeners to the three-movement Fiori Musicali of Pelēcis who are unfamiliar with this…
…composer may find this work a delightful revelation. The most diatonic of the works on the program, it begins with broad neo-Romantic music in a sentimental vein but gradually evolves into quite something else. The work certainly would hold its own on a program with Glass or Reich, and Kremer’s release, in general, exposes valuable music not in common circulation. The sound from Latvian Radio’s Riga Recording Studio is excellent. — AMG
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