Customer Reviews

Silencio

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Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica deliver another excellent recording in "Silencio", on the Nonesuch label. Featuring music of three twentieth century composers, this CD contains performances which are moving and dramatic.

Arvo Part's "Tabula Rasa" gets its most spacious recording yet on disc. The first movement, "Ludus", is performed with long pauses of silence between the dramatic utterances of strings and prepared piano. At 10:21, this is longer than any of the other three performances I own of this piece. The second movement, "Silentium", times at 18:24, including about a half-minute of recorded silence at the end of the movement. This is over five minutes longer than Neeme Jarvi's fine recording for Deutsche Grammophon. But length alone is not the measure of the caliber of this performance - orchestra and soloists give wonderful, broad performances, letting this great work breathe calmly and fully.

The four short movements of "Company" by Philip Glass are rich with color and rhythmic energy. Fans of Richard Einhorn's "Voices of Light" will enjoy this brief work.

"Come In" by Vladimir Martynov was a revelation. I found a single reference to this composer on the web - it mentioned stylistic similarities with Arvo Part and an output of predominantly sacred vocal music. "Come In" is a meditation on a hymn-like tune; the tune is restated in each of the six movements with slight changes in structure. Each restatement is followed by a variation for two violin soloists. The music is sweet, romantic without becoming sickening, and gives the effect of joyful anticipation frozen in sound. You will not want this piece to end, and when it does you will have to supply the closure. Whether or not the door is opened will be for you to decide.

The program concludes with a premiere recording of "Darf ich..." by Arvo Part. It shares harmonic similarities with "Kanon Pokajanen" and is once again superbly performed by Kremer and the Kremerata.

This disc goes on my short list of favorite recordings. You won't be disappointed!

First of all, why silence? And how?

After all, one has to agree with John Cage when he points out that "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot."

What then does it mean to call an album "Silencio"?

I think what it means is that the music in this album tries not to communicate something to its listener, but rather aims at helping one communicate with one's Self. This lack of intentional outward interaction, and the parallel promotion of introspection, I think, is intended to be thought of as a silence. Indeed, the emotional landscape it allows us to observe is, perhaps, the closest thing to silence, for it is a still and timeless picture, void of any matter, absorbed in a heartbeat alone.

Technically this album is superb, with Gidon Kremer and his disciples proving to be, as always, up to the highest of expectations. The prepared piano in Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa deserves praise as well - I have never heard the piano sound so beautiful, evocative and majestic at once. As for Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass and Vladimir Martynov, they are, of course, a handsome lot to be found combined in one CD, with 68 minutes of music at a reasonable price by Nonesuch's standards. The nature of these composers, however, is what makes this album a product that not everyone is likely to care for. I feel quite certain that anyone who likes minimalist music - in the style of Gorecki or Kancheli, for instance - will find this album enticing. On the contrary, I recommend those who believe simplicity to be a symptom of stupidity to spend their money in a different way, for the music in this album is indeed a minimalist delight.

I'm a fan of Glass and Part, but I have to confess that their music on this CD more or less went in one ear and out the other. That's not a bad thing, because I like their work and listen to plenty of it. I just, wasn't bowled over, is all.

(I was using the CD as background music; their works here may grow on me in time.)

I had to rush here to recommend this CD, though, because I was so moved by Vladimir Martynov's "Come In."

At first I was put off by it, because I had purchased the CD exactly because I am fans of Glass and Part, and I expected the CD to consist of music in their minimalist style.

Martynov's "Come In" struck me, at first, as being more Romantic, and I just wasn't sure what to make of it.

Soon, though, I completely forgot about style, and about the (annoying) work-related task I was attempting to perform while listening to this CD. "Come In" seduced me like I haven't been seduced by a piece of new music in a long time. I was close to tears in parts.

I lack a sophisticated vocabulary to discuss classical music, but I can tell you that "Come In" struck me as sweet and beautiful, but also complex, deep, and never cloying. I did feel that I was being invited into a numinous experience.

Later, when I read the liner notes, I was even more moved. What Martynov said about his piece and his goals, the ideas and sensations he wished to convey and evoke, worked perfectly for me.

Needless to say with Kremer, the musicianship is first rate.

A fascinating combination of "modern" works to appreciate on this disc. All quite different, powerful juxtaposition of styles and moods. Tabula Rasa, the "lead-off" composition by Arvo Part, packs stunning intensity of a dark, melancholy sort in Part's minimalist, yet melodic vein. Next is Glass's "Company" for string orchestra. Pardon my simple mind, but I really do enjoy the regular/irregular pulsing, throbbing undercurrent of his works. The style is highly characteristic, yet, within that signature framework, he pulls in just enough complexity and variation in my opinion to make this highly worthwhile fare. Then, "Come In" by Martynov. What can I say, this is easy listening, but a real deep "easy" at that. Positively brought a lump to my throat and then some! Tell you the truth, I was so drained after these first three pieces, that I had to take a break before the final item, Darf Ich by Part. Listen again & again when you're in a bit of a heavy mood that deserves musical concordance. The performance/performers work these treasures to the hilt. I'd pare my CD collection from 1200 down to 12, and "Silencio" would remain.

Violinist Gidon Kremer and his namesake chamber orchestra present works by three composers on this delightful Nonesuch recording. The CD opens with a version of Aarvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa that comes across as a more expressive, less "mystical" arrangement and interpretation than previously encountered. Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko play the solo violin parts, Reinut Tepp plays the prepared piano, and conductor Eri Klas leads the chamber orchestra in this work, which was originally dedicated to and premiered by Kremer, Grindenko, and Klas in 1977. Even if you think you are familiar with this work, it will be worth your while to hear what these musicians have done with it this time around.

The next composition is Company by Philip Glass. Fortunately, this is a brief piece in four movements, only one of them lasting more than two minutes.

Following this brief bit of banality, Vladimir Martynov's Come In! for two violins (in this instance, Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko, to whom the piece is dedicated) and string orchestra comes as a welcome relief, showing that richly expressive music can be written for modest forces. This is a six-movement work of tender expression and heartfelt emotional honesty, sweet but not sugary, a piece that you will want to play over and over again. It is truly a work of great beauty.

The CD closes with Pärt's Darf Ich, a brief piece (4:15) for, violin, bell, and strings. This is another richly expressive piece that belies Pärt's reputation as a minimalist.

The recorded sound is excellent, with a sweet tone to the violins and a nice sense of space. Once again, Gidon Kremer has brought us music of great beauty that we might not ever have been able to hear without his dedicated advocacy. We owe him a debt of gratitude for his musical and spiritual gift (and yes, Nonesuch, we appreciate your role in making this production available.)

Come In! compares to Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood. It has the same multiple iterations of a motif, with varied embellishments, that becomes hypnotic and moving and is a spiritual expedition.
Also the same honesty, humility and tenderness.

Everything on this record is part of a journey, from the stasis/writhings of Tabula Rasa and the paroxysmal lament that is Darf Ich to the impetus/inertia of Company, to the measured caresses of Come In, many shades of human suffering and searching are represented. Beautiful, compulsive listening.

This 2001 Nonesuch record is a sad example of the label's love for gimmicky programming, and it's sad to see great violinist Gidon Kremer and his chamber ensemble Kremerata Baltica associated with it. In the 1970s and 1980s, composers in both the Soviet Union and the United States explored styles of calm contemplation and minimal development.

Arvo Part, the devoutly religious Estonian composer, is represented here by two pieces. "Tabula Rasa" (1977) is a sort of concerto grosso for two violvins, prepared piano, and string orchestra. Its first movement, "Ludus", is loud and active where a theme is gradually developed before collapsing into aleatoric writing. In the second movement, "Silentium", the ensemble goes over another theme at slow tempo and low dynamics. "Tabula Rasa" is an interesting piece, containing a great deal of musical substance yet utterly transparent in its construction. While this recording does feature the three dedicatees of the work, violinists Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko and conductor Eri Klas, and has great sound quality, I much prefer the classic ECM recording which has a greater clarity of line. The other piece here by Arvo Part is the four-minute "Darf ich..." for violin solo, bell and strings (1995, rev. 1999) is structured as Part's other tintinnabuli works, but the solo violin part

While Part is a composer who shows great invention behind the facade of timeless bell-like tones, the other composers here represent minimalism at its most vacuous and commercial. Philip Glass' "Company" for string orchestra (1983) was written as incidental music for a Beckett play. Glass' music probably works quite well when accompanying some theatrical work--and the composer even calls his genre "theatrical music", but there's very little in the way of purely musical substance here. Vladimir Martynov's "Come In!" for two violins and string orchestra (1988) is, except for a woodblock occasionally marking time, the very picture of a generic film score.

If you are an Arvo Part completist, this disc might interest you because of the world-premiere recording of "Darf ich...". However, in the non-Part pieces here there's very little of substance, and even people who are looking for audience-friendly contemporary music and buy this will probably end up bored and disappointed.

Musically the Twentieth Century is like the month of March. It came in like a lion, with monumental orchestral masterpieces like the Mahler Symphonies, the Strauss Tone Poems, and Stravinsky's ballet scores. But as the artistic, political, and economic climate changed, the monumental became increasingly rare. Most living composers today will never have a performance of one of their works by a major professional symphony orchestra. And so, for the most part, the Twentieth Century goes out like a lamb, with the intimate replacing the enormous. And Gidon Kremer, with his string ensemble the Kremerata Baltica, reflects this aesthetic change in his new CD Silencio. Certainly one wouldn't expect heart-on-your-sleeve emotion and drama from a CD with this title, and there is none to be had here. I have to totally disagree with the writer who says this recording is full of drama--I found scarcely any at all. This CD contains four pieces; of them, only the first, Arvo Part's Tabula Rasa even attempts an aesthetic involving drama, and that only in the first movement. The title of this piece comes from the term for the pure, naive and innocent mind before it receives the impressions gained from experience, and this idea pervades the entire CD. In place of traditional liner notes with information about the composers and their works, we are given obtuse and somewhat ominous quotations by the performers and composers, such as the following from Kremer himself: "Our despair: a drop in an ocean. Death--the final bill, in which the challenge turns into a phantom. Ambitions, hopes, enchantment. All this finds its peace there in the world beyond. Words irritate. Gestures mislead. Emotions dissolve. Only sounds speak a language that might be understood. If one opens the heart, would there be someone receptive enough? But who is listening? Who is able to feel it? Often I do ask myself, where does a heartbeat identical to mine exist? And the attempt of an answer is: out there, on the other end of my own sound."

In addition to "Tabula Rasa", there is another work by the Estonian composer Part, "Darf Ich" (or "May I"), "Company" by Philip Glass in an arrangement for string orchestra, and "Come In" a piece commissioned by Kremer from the little known Russian composer Vladimir Martynov. But aside from the opening Part work, I find that the intimate tone of the CD is too consistently bland for my taste. There are better quiet works out there, that reach into a deeper place beyond the mere superficiality of Martynov's lengthy but unengaging "Come In". Although he began his career in an interesting way, moving from early efforts involving serialism, to electronics, to the composition of a religious Russian rock-opera, at some point he embraced the ideas of "holy minimalism" and from my perspective seems to have eliminated all traces of interest in his work. It is difficult to appreciate a composer who comes out of the soviet oppression with the attitude Martynov expressed when discussing another of his works, "I was once told that man touches the truth twice. The first time is the first cry from a newborn baby's lips and the last is the death rattle. Everytthing between is untruth to a greater or lesser extent. So why not try to go all the way from the death rattle to the first cry, from the last opus to the first? But that might lead us to see Stalin standing on the Mausoleum as innocent and lofty as a swallow, and a swallow gulping a mosquito in flight would seem no less nightmarish and monstrous than Stalin, who destroyed millions of lives. All this is terribly confusing and it is much better to forget all the conundrums and sink into sweet melancholy. And let this melancholy last as long as possible; I suppose that's the only answer to the question of reality." In the work presented here, Martynov sinks into sweet melancholy again, which is pretty enough, but to my ear as bland as wallpaper. For the three or four minutes any single movement lasts it is fine, but the entire 6 movement work lasting 27 minutes is all exactly the same, without any contrast. Why would a composer in this century be composing music like this? Where is the artistry, the vision, the craftsmanship? All of the great Romantic composers, from Beethoven to Mahler, did this same thing long ago and so very much better. And of the Glass piece presented here, the less said the better. Even the fabulous performance by the Kremerata Baltica, surely one of the finest string orchestras around, cannot raise my interest in a piece (written as incidental music to a Beckett play) which simply rehashes the same Glass harmonic and rhythmic formulas he has been working on for 40 years now. As I listen to this, I can't help but think that Glass forgot to write the melody. To be honest, I find the piece so lacking in any artistic merit that I will not even play an excerpt for you. I hate to be a Grinch about this, but this is a CD that I hope I don't find in my stocking this Christmas. I know it is not popular here at Amazon to be critical of the CDs one reviews, but there is so much better music out there, even with this same introspective aesthetic, that I cannot recommend this at all except as a superb performance of the Part Tabula Rasa, which has in fact been recorded by Kremer before. It's not that I dislike contemporary music, or minimalism, or intimate introspective music; quite the opposite--it's that I find these pieces very poorly done, and extremely disappointing examples of their ilk.