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Much vacuous music, and the large Part piece exists in better performance elsewhere   April 7, 2008

"Come In" -- Must Listening   January 26, 2005

Easy & not-easy, but all profound, moving & rewarding   July 2, 2001

A minimalist delight.   February 17, 2001

Technically this album is superb, with Gidon Kremer and his disciples proving to be, as always, up to the highest of expectations. The prepared piano in Arvo Paert's Tabula Rasa deserves praise as well - I have never heard the piano sound so beautiful, evocative and majestic at once. As for Arvo Paert, Philip Glass and Vladimir Martynov, they are, of course, a handsome lot to be found combined in one CD, with 68 minutes of music at a reasonable price by Nonesuch's standards. The nature of these composers, however, is what makes this album a product that not everyone is likely to care for. I feel quite certain that anyone who likes minimalist music - in the style of Gorecki or Kancheli, for instance - will find this album enticing. On the contrary, I recommend those who believe simplicity to be a symptom of stupidity to spend their money in a different way, for the music in this album is indeed a minimalist delight.


If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Silencio   December 19, 2000
  39 out of 81 found this review helpful

Musically the Twentieth Century is like the month of March. It came in like a lion, with monumental orchestral masterpieces like the Mahler Symphonies, the Strauss Tone Poems, and Stravinsky's ballet scores. But as the artistic, political, and economic climate changed, the monumental became increasingly rare. Most living composers today will never have a performance of one of their works by a major professional symphony orchestra. And so, for the most part, the Twentieth Century goes out like a lamb, with the intimate replacing the enormous. And Gidon Kremer, with his string ensemble the Kremerata Baltica, reflects this aesthetic change in his new CD Silencio. Certainly one wouldn't expect heart-on-your-sleeve emotion and drama from a CD with this title, and there is none to be had here. I have to totally disagree with the writer who says this recording is full of drama--I found scarcely any at all. This CD contains four pieces; of them, only the first, Arvo Part's Tabula Rasa even attempts an aesthetic involving drama, and that only in the first movement. The title of this piece comes from the term for the pure, naive and innocent mind before it receives the impressions gained from experience, and this idea pervades the entire CD. In place of traditional liner notes with information about the composers and their works, we are given obtuse and somewhat ominous quotations by the performers and composers, such as the following from Kremer himself: "Our despair: a drop in an ocean. Death--the final bill, in which the challenge turns into a phantom. Ambitions, hopes, enchantment. All this finds its peace there in the world beyond. Words irritate. Gestures mislead. Emotions dissolve. Only sounds speak a language that might be understood. If one opens the heart, would there be someone receptive enough? But who is listening? Who is able to feel it? Often I do ask myself, where does a heartbeat identical to mine exist? And the attempt of an answer is: out there, on the other end of my own sound."

In addition to "Tabula Rasa", there is another work by the Estonian composer Part, "Darf Ich" (or "May I"), "Company" by Philip Glass in an arrangement for string orchestra, and "Come In" a piece commissioned by Kremer from the little known Russian composer Vladimir Martynov. But aside from the opening Part work, I find that the intimate tone of the CD is too consistently bland for my taste. There are better quiet works out there, that reach into a deeper place beyond the mere superficiality of Martynov's lengthy but unengaging "Come In". Although he began his career in an interesting way, moving from early efforts involving serialism, to electronics, to the composition of a religious Russian rock-opera, at some point he embraced the ideas of "holy minimalism" and from my perspective seems to have eliminated all traces of interest in his work. It is difficult to appreciate a composer who comes out of the soviet oppression with the attitude Martynov expressed when discussing another of his works, "I was once told that man touches the truth twice. The first time is the first cry from a newborn baby's lips and the last is the death rattle. Everytthing between is untruth to a greater or lesser extent. So why not try to go all the way from the death rattle to the first cry, from the last opus to the first? But that might lead us to see Stalin standing on the Mausoleum as innocent and lofty as a swallow, and a swallow gulping a mosquito in flight would seem no less nightmarish and monstrous than Stalin, who destroyed millions of lives. All this is terribly confusing and it is much better to forget all the conundrums and sink into sweet melancholy. And let this melancholy last as long as possible; I suppose that's the only answer to the question of reality." In the work presented here, Martynov sinks into sweet melancholy again, which is pretty enough, but to my ear as bland as wallpaper. For the three or four minutes any single movement lasts it is fine, but the entire 6 movement work lasting 27 minutes is all exactly the same, without any contrast. Why would a composer in this century be composing music like this? Where is the artistry, the vision, the craftsmanship? All of the great Romantic composers, from Beethoven to Mahler, did this same thing long ago and so very much better. And of the Glass piece presented here, the less said the better. Even the fabulous performance by the Kremerata Baltica, surely one of the finest string orchestras around, cannot raise my interest in a piece (written as incidental music to a Beckett play) which simply rehashes the same Glass harmonic and rhythmic formulas he has been working on for 40 years now. As I listen to this, I can't help but think that Glass forgot to write the melody. To be honest, I find the piece so lacking in any artistic merit that I will not even play an excerpt for you. I hate to be a Grinch about this, but this is a CD that I hope I don't find in my stocking this Christmas. I know it is not popular here at Amazon to be critical of the CDs one reviews, but there is so much better music out there, even with this same introspective aesthetic, that I cannot recommend this at all except as a superb performance of the Part Tabula Rasa, which has in fact been recorded by Kremer before. It's not that I dislike contemporary music, or minimalism, or intimate introspective music; quite the opposite--it's that I find these pieces very poorly done, and extremely disappointing examples of their ilk.