Kremer Plays Mozart

Gidon Kremer is, and has always been, one of the most headstrong and original artists in the music business and he was once hailed by Herbert von Karajan as the world’s best violinist. He celebrated his 60th birthday in 2007 and he has always kept himself young musically with his spontaneity and a readiness to take risks. In his artistic development over the past 25 years, Kremer often found himself functioning as a crossover figure as he discovered fresh routes through well-trodden paths in music. It was in this spirit, that his fine young ensemble Kremerata Baltica, which he founded by bringing together young musicians from the Baltic states, presents music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart coupled with two contemporary works inspired by the great composer on this DVD. Recorded at the Salzburg Mozart Festival in 2002, the Grammy-award winning chamber orchestra, played Estonian Arvo Pärt’s “Mozart-Adagio” composed in the mid 1990s and “Moz-Art à la Haydn,” a humorous reflection on the two Austrian masters by Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) side by side with famous orchestral and chamber music by Mozart. Kremer and his orchestra greet Mozart as their contemporary, so to speak, inviting him to take a seat amongst the musical paradigms of our time and even to play along. Mozart becomes a figure projected between the worlds, gleefully transporting the eavesdropping onlooker into Kremer’s exciting musical art.