The return of the chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica to Orchestra Hall on Wednesday night marked two milestones: The group’s own 20th anniversary, and the 70th birthday of its founder, sometime conductor and guiding spirit, the Latvian-born, Russian-trained violin virtuoso Gidon Kremer. It was a happy occasion, marred only by the unrestrained coughing of some audience members.
This crack ensemble of youthful musicians from the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia has been a welcome visitor to downtown Chicago since its local debut in 2000. With each concert, Kremer and friends have brought with them neglected 20th century repertory the violinist has prominently championed. The freshness of their performances and refusal to settle for routine programming continue to set them apart.
The focal point of Wednesday’s typically imaginative program — string orchestra works by Polish, Russian, Estonian and Ukrainian composers — was Chamber Symphony No. 4 by Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Having long languished in the shadow of his friend and fellow Muscovite Dmitri Shostakovich, the Polish-born Weinberg has been enjoying a renaissance in recent years, thanks to recordings, the advocacy of true believers such as Kremer, and performances worldwide of the prolific composer’s operatic masterpiece “The Passenger,” which Lyric Opera presented in 2015.
MOST READ ENTERTAINMENT NEWS THIS HOUR
The Fourth Chamber Symphony (1992), scored for string orchestra and clarinet, was the final work Weinberg completed before his death in 1996. Shostakovich’s brooding spirit hovers over the four connected sections, which veer between spare, elegiac quiet shattered by fierce string ostinatos driven by piercing wails of clarinet, some of them couched in Shostakovichian sarcasm. Suggestions of klezmer music lend a kind of jaunty relief to the otherwise somber ruminations. The enigmatic jingle of a triangle is the last sound we hear.
Performed without conductor, the piece exerted its strongest hold on this listener not through its aggressive pages (beholden as they are to Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 8) but, rather, through the exquisitely refined tone quality the Kremerata string players brought to softly sustained sections. Mate Bekavac brought an incisive voice to the obbligato clarinet part. ECM New Series has just released a Kremerata recording of all four Weinberg chamber symphonies, along with an orchestration of his Piano Quintet.
Kremer has long spoken of his relationship with the Kremerata in familial terms. His caring performances of three short works for violin (with and without string accompaniment) at the beginning, middle and end of the program suggested how deeply shared that family spirit has become over the past two decades.
Thus, launching the program with Arvo Part’s “Fratres,” the Estonian composer’s best-known work (its Latin title translates as “brothers”), carried symbolic as well as musical meaning. Of the dozen or more versions of the iconic Part piece, this one conveys the music’s spiritual inwardness with a spare luminosity that approaches the ineffable. Kremer and colleagues did its musical poetry proud.
The three works that made up the second half were played without pause, in an apparent attempt to suggest musical interrelationships.
Following a warmly considered but not sticky performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade melancolique” (as arranged by Russian film composer Leonid Desyatnikov), Kremer surrendered the stage to his ensemble for another transcription — Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” arranged for strings by Jacques Cohen, with additional percussion parts by Kremerata percussionist Andrei Pushkarev.
Although the group had performed this arrangement of “Pictures” with projected images of paintings by the Russian artist and social commentator Maxim Kantor earlier in its current U.S. tour, no visual component was included here Wednesday.
Nice as it was to encounter the familiar Mussorgsky work done up differently — “The Great Gate of Kiev” was laced with chiming bells and crunching tam-tam, for example — one cannot say that this string orchestration is any improvement, generally speaking, over the famous Ravel orchestration, or any of the other grand symphonic treatments “Pictures” has received. The Kremerata dispatched it with hearty involvement, the unidentified concertmaster helping to enforce tidy attacks and releases.
Valentin Silvestrov’s simple but eloquent little Serenade for Solo Violin (2009) prompted a clamor of applause that in turn prompted two encores — “All in the Past,” a kind of Russian-Argentinian tango; and Mikhail Pletnev’s tiny homage to Weinberg, “Nach dem Weinbergsteig” (that’s German for “After the Weinberg Climb”).
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
More Top Picks Why Comic Sans Is Recommended For Dyslexic Readers
Twitter @jvonrhein
RELATED STORIES:
Recommended Chicago-area classical concerts
CSO’s 2017-18 subscription season sticks to a mostly familiar refrain
.galleries:after {
content: ”;
display: block;
background-color: #144A7C;
margin: 16px auto 0;
height: 5px;
width: 100px;
}
.galleries:before {
content: “Entertainment Photos and Video”;
display: block;
font: 700 20px Georgia,serif;
text-align: center;
color: #1e1e1e;
var playlist = ‘chi_ent_movie_trailers’,
layout = ‘autoblurb’,
iu = ‘%2F4011%2Ftrb.chicagotribune%2Fent’;
Watch the latest movie trailers.