Classical audio file

By JOHN BELL YOUNG, Times correspondent

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 20, 2001

SILENCIO, GIDON KREMER/KREMERATA BALTICA (NONESUCH) What may have begun in earnest in the piano music of Debussy has evolved into what popular culture calls minimalism and what theorists call catatonic homophony. That's a neat turn of phrase, and an appropriate one too, where much of the music on Silencio is concerned. Indeed, if there is anything that links these disparate works, it is the idea that quiescence goes a long way to making a philosophical point.

Violinist Gidon Kremer has long been a champion of the Estonian-born Austrian composer Arvo Part (born in 1935). The stark, spare and slow-moving Tabula Rasa, composed in 1977, is Part's signature piece. It is no wonder, given its compositional severity, that it attracted international attention in the waning days of the Cold War.

In this work, endlessly reiterated motivic material and pitch relations convey its angst in widely spaced dissonances. To this end, Part appropriates two violins and a prepared piano (evocative of a large bell) to paint a bleak, even mechanistic world devoid of joy and opulence, but not hope.

As fascinating as Tabula Rasa may be, it is neither as succinct nor impressive as Darf Ich (May I?), composed in 1995, and revised four years later. In this performance, ably conducted by Eri Klas, the message is even grimmer. Its gritty harmonies, at once dense and compressed, give way to a musical evocation of a 4-minute scream in silence.

Academy Award winner and minimalism's guru Philip Glass (born in 1937) composed Company in 1983, the same year that he penned his film score to Koyaanisqatsi and his Egyptian language opera, Akhnaton. With its mesmerizing, if tiresome and endlessly repetitive, melo-rhythms it emerges as a work in search of a script.

Vladimir Martynov (born in 1946) is a Russian minimalist who has devoted his career to the composition of sacred music and rock operas, most notably The Seraphic Visions of St. Francis of Assisi. His six-movement Come In! is a tonal anachronism, a saccharine, sentimental and implicitly romantic ode, it would seem, to Schumann. Like the Glass, it seems destined for a celluloid reincarnation in Hollywood, perhaps as a period-film score.

Kremer's performances are exemplary, deeply felt and pristinely executed. Whatever one might think of Part, Glass and Martynov, they have in Kremer an ideal protagonist and an even better interpreter.

Grade: B

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