Instead of lounging by the lake
PLYMOUTH, N.H. - The violinist Gidon Kremer is one of the most brilliantly unpredictable performers before the public today. You never know where he'll turn up or what he might play. Once, in 1992, he helped the Boston Symphony Orchestra out of a jam by tossing off three violin concertos on a single program and then capping the affair with a contemporary fantasy on Paganini as an encore.
This week, after completing his intensive 11-day Lockenhaus Festival in Austria, Kremer had plans to vacation at the country home of a Boston-area friend who is also a supporter of the New Hampshire Music Festival. Sensing an opportunity to make a match, the friend wondered if Kremer, you know, while he was in the area, might just play a little something with the local summer orchestra?
The great Latvian violinist obliged, and on Thursday night he wandered into the Silver Center for the Arts at Plymouth State University and unspooled a mesmerizing work by the contemporary Georgian composer Giya Kancheli. While he was at it, he also ripped through the Sibelius Violin Concerto in an extraordinary reading that was intellectually probing, technically explosive, and viscerally thrilling. In the department of thanks-for-having-me gifts offered to a host, this one was pretty hard to beat.
Kremer's appearance itself was naturally a boon for this modestly scaled yet enterprising festival, now in its 56th season, and catering to a mostly local audience. Organizers hope that a new $10 million concert hall slated to open in nearby Center Harbor in the summer of 2010 will help raise its profile. There are also plans to build new housing for the festival's resident orchestra. On its own terms, the group sounded robust and respectable in Thursday's curtain-raising performance of Mozart's Symphony No. 40, though one wished for more grace, color, and expressive shape in conductor Paul Polivnick's interpretation.
After the Mozart, Kremer took the stage with cellist Giedre Dirvanauskaite for Kancheli's "Silent Prayer," a work written last year to honor the birthdays of Kremer (his 60th) and Mstislav Rostropovich (his 80th). The piece positions the two soloists in a kind of rapt and hushed dialogue with a string orchestra augmented by vibraphone, bass guitar, and a recording of a young Georgian girl singing simple phrases of poetry. As with much of Kancheli's work, the spare and ruminative music seems to drift off the stage with infinite slowness, like a mist. Kremer and his colleague, floating wispy lines from the highest reaches of their instruments, were compelling guides to this ethereal landscape.
These days, Kremer can most typically be heard in contemporary music like Kancheli's; but when he plays standard repertoire, the results can be revelatory. The first movement of the Sibelius sounded as if Kremer had deconstructed and reconstructed every line, bringing out certain contours that typically go completely unnoticed. Gone was any hint of pro forma virtuosity or the escapist pleasures of a late-Romantic costume drama - this was the Sibelius Concerto as the found object of a penetrating contemporary mind.
That said, with all of his intellectual sophistication, it's easy to forget that Kremer also commands a technical arsenal that is second to none. He pulled it out for the third movement and let loose a barrage of iconoclastic bowings, fingerings, and articulations that made this music seem completely fresh and at the same time utterly dazzling. The crowd erupted.
Kremer has no formal American engagements next season, but one can always hope he's up for another restful vacation in New England.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
