Music |
Mozart: Complete Violin Concertos
By
Published: Jan 19, 2016
Category:
Classical
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. [To buy the CDs — there are 108 minutes of music on 2 CDs — from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
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.
