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Published: Aug 10, 2009
Category: Classical
My wife did her best to bankrupt us during the Presidential election --- if you want Obama swag, don’t go to ebay, write me --- but I’m thoroughly disgusted by the White House’s handling of its health care initiative. This is leadership? How about staking out a position (say: single-payer) and selling the hell out of it? How about calling out the Congressmen (Democrats included) who are owned and operated by insurance agencies and telling us exactly how much they’ve been paid to vote against their community’s interest?
While I’m at it, how about a minute of rage against the mass media, which can’t tell the difference between a football game and a serious issue? This issue is not beyond explanation. And there are actual facts involved. But all the lazy sots on TV care about is where the ball sits on the field and who’s got momentum.
And can we have a brief sneer at the demagogues in the media and the Congress who know better but take pleasure in scaring people with talk of “death panels” and “socialism”?
Finally, couldn’t we hear universal condemnation of these goon squads intent on disrupting public forums? I was re-reading They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. This jumped out at me: “The men who burned synagogues did not live in the cities of the synagogues.” You think it’s different now?
Yes. I’m pissed. I’m always irked by stupid, but when you add a big portion of malice and dishonesty, I start to redline.
This is why, today, I’m so grateful to have Gidon Kremer’s two-CD set of Mozart’s five violin concertos.
You may think of Mozart only as a pianist. (That’s the power of movies.) But then you probably believe his corpse was dumped in a pauper’s grave. (Guess what? In the last year of his life, Mozart earned the equivalent of $100,000.) The fact is that Mozart had a special love for strings. At 6, he stunned his father with his proficiency. Later, he relished playing in quartets --- on viola, so he sat dead-center and could hear players on both sides.
Mozart wrote his violin concertos with reverence for the existing form. But, as ever, he had too many ideas to be constrained by genre. There are sudden bursts of music that sounds Turkish. You’ll swear gypsies slipped into the studio for a few seconds. And then you’ll be stunned by how fast Mozart can shift from jaunty bravado to deep pathos and back again to radiant optimism.
Gidon Kremer recorded these concertos live, which is exactly what you want from a violinist who plays with great emotion. Those emotions did not come easily. Kremer was born in Latvia in 1947 --- he felt “the pressure of the state ideology.” Then he won the 1970 Tchaikovsky competition and conductor Herbert von Karajan called him "the greatest violinist in the world". And then he left the Soviet Union.
This is a violinist who’s gloriously free, playing concertos that couldn’t be livelier. This is 108 minutes of quality, played by a master on an instrument made in 1641. And quality always reminds us that we don’t have to keep our heads mired in the daily stupidity.
To buy Gidon Kremer’s CD of Mozart’s Complete Violin Concertos from Amazon.com, click here.
To download Gidon Kremer’s CD of Mozart’s Violin Concertos from Amazon.com, click here.