Gidon Kremer

Gidon Kremer claims he doesn’t want to make a political statement in the liner notes to his latest album. Yet the same notes for De Profundis go on about greed for oil and those living under oppressive regimes: “Drunk on oil, the worshippers of the golden calf seek to silence opposition and build walls between people and states.” He dedicates the recording to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos Oil Company, who’s been controversially imprisoned in Siberia for fraud since 2005.

Gidon Kremer claims he doesn’t want to make a political statement in the liner notes to his latest album. Yet the same notes for De Profundis go on about greed for oil and those living under oppressive regimes: “Drunk on oil, the worshippers of the golden calf seek to silence opposition and build walls between people and states.” He dedicates the recording to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos Oil Company, who’s been controversially imprisoned in Siberia for fraud since 2005.

With global injustice on his mind, the Latvian überviolinist has fashioned a playlist of personal favorites written by composers who “cry out for a better world.” Performed by Kremer and his namesake chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica, the album slots contemporary music alongside sturdy classics such as Schubert’s Minuet No. 3 and Trios in D minor and Shostakovich’s adagio from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Stalin attacked the opera in 1936, as the opening salvo in the Politburo’s campaign against creative freedom under the aesthetic doctrine of Soviet Realism. Kremer’s choice seems to be fueled just as much by the piece’s political resonance as the edgy, devastating beauty of the music.

Uniting music under certain political banners can be like piecing together a jigsaw from several puzzle sets. But De Profundis’s achievement is sequencing 12 diverse pieces into a slow-moving fog of heartbreak and spirituality. Whether it’s Sibelius’s evocative tone poem “Scene with Cranes” leading into Arvo Pärt’s searing Passacaglia, or a Schumann Fugue following Michael Nyman’s Trysting Fields, Kremer’s ear and emotions are in perfect sync.

• More Album reviews
• More Opera & Classical articles