Violinist Gidon Kremer was unusually quick to develop an aesthetic of his own and has long been ahead of his time. This independence is most obvious in his love for contemporary music, which he developed as a conservatory student in Moscow and which brought him into contact with composers such as Pärt, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and later on, Weinberg. But Kremer also has a history of fascination with repertoire at the edges of the canon, such as Schumann’s neglected Violin Concerto, and with bringing musical worlds together. On his second recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (1980), Kremer chose Alfred Schnittke’s cadenza—unheard then and still rarely played. It’s not difficult to imagine how executives at his label at the time, Philips, must have reacted. Kremer was an early and perceptive critic of the Western classical music industry, with its conservatism and fixation on stardom—criticisms Kremer began making as early as the 1970s, when complaining about the business was not yet considered de rigeur.
In 1981, Kremer founded one of the first chamber music festivals in the German-speaking world in Lockenhaus, Austria, realizing his dream of a home for collaborative, spontaneous music-making. 16 years later, he founded the Kremerata Baltica. Kremer also found a characteristic tone early on in his violin career: direct, raw, full of tension and gripping intensity. “You hear the first bars and you know it’s him,” said violinist Veronika Eberle of Kremer’s recording of the Mozart violin concertos with Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1984). “His playing has an incredible number of ideas in a small space; it’s a unique, slightly crazy Mozart.”
As a political observer, Kremer recognized Putin’s imperial aspirations early on. In an interview in January 2014, before the annexation of Crimea, Kremer said, “Part of the Russian soul is also its delusions of grandeur, and that is not harmless. Putin is smarter than people think. That is the problem; that is the danger. He’s playing with the credulity of the Western world.”
I met the 76-year-old on a Friday afternoon in his apartment in the well-to-do West Berlin neighborhood of Charlottenburg. The space was airy, with an open-plan kitchen, but there was hardly any furniture: Instead there were boxes of books on the floor, concert posters on the walls, and a few pictures from a bygone era. “I’m rarely here. It’s a place to stay, but I still need to design it,” he told me. “I’m trying to think of Berlin as my home now, but I don’t quite feel it yet.”
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