"Rag-Gidon-Time" for violin and piano

Gidon Kremer (violin)
Leonid Chizhik (piano)

Deutsche Grammophon 474 801-2

Combined with:
Liszt: Années de pèlerinage: Italie
Liszt: Après une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi sonata
Vustin: Tango hommage à Gidon
Pelecis: Meeting with a Friend
Dunayevsky: Circus
Chizhik: Fantasy Variations on a Theme by Mozart
Bakshi: The Unanswered Call

Kremerata Baltica
Andrey Pushkarev (percussion)
Gidon Kremer(violin)
Leonid Chizhik (piano)

The long and the short of musical jokes – and the shorter the better!

There is a fashion these days for this brand of whimsical pastiche, to give it a kind name (pointless parasitism would be more direct). In a sense there always has been, except that your average mainstream pot-pourri, Stravinskian neo-classical rewrite, or even recomposition à la Shchedrin Carmen-ballet, shows a degree of inventiveness and wit far beyond the ken of the stuff that Gidon Kremer sees fit to endorse.

Broadly speaking, the worthwhile pieces on this disc are the shorter ones: namely Alexander Vustin’s partially dodecaphonic Tango, Kancheli’s ghostly fluttering Rag-Gidon-Time, and Pelécis’s Meeting with a Friend. The last of these proves that playfulness need not equate with feeble-mindedness. Unhappily demonstrating that it nevertheless may, Alexander Bakshi’s The Unanswered Call, with its cute mobile phone tones, is the artistic nadir.

The two longest items are Sergey Dreznin’s souping-up of Liszt’s Dante Sonata, complete with solo part for Kremer himself, which is a structurally flabby affair, and Leonid Chizhik’s Fantasy Variations on the first movement theme from Mozart’s alla Turca Sonata, which has its engaging moments, but not nearly enough of them to fill out 25 minutes (plus it is hard at times to know whether the sub-restaurant-pianist doodlings are being held up for our admiration or for ridicule). Quite possibly it is the balance between affection and disgust that Dreznin has in mind with his mercifully brief skit on Dunayevsky film scores, in which the players double as chorus with cliched interjections.

The disc is well-filled, but only about a third of it has any substance, and the fact that so much skill has been expended in the playing and presentation is, as they say, thought-provoking. Of course, one person’s insufferably puerile prank is another’s deliciously subversive send-up, so I should probably grit my teeth and conclude that Kremer and Co’s musical jokes may delight some listeners as much as they infuriate and bore me.

David Fanning
Gramophone, March 2005