Classical Life

I happen to enjoy concerts where the music being performed is unfamiliar to me, where my ears are asked to assess the quality of the pieces themselves and not only the performances of them, where I might hear something new that I like rather than another rehashing of a bona fide masterpiece that I already know I like. But that’s just me.

The unfamiliar names on the Segerstrom Concert Hall program last night – scary-looking monikers such as Raminta Šernšnyte, Steven Kovacs Tickmayer, Arvo Pärt and Lera Auerbach, which, if you looked closely enough, belonged to persons still among the living – were enough to keep Orange County away in droves. There was plenty of elbow room. That despite the celebrated performers onstage – Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra. But then name recognition doesn’t get you very far in classical music these days.

Perhaps this type of concert, featuring new music prominently, will never be box office gold, but it seems to me that Kremer and his ensemble are the opposite of an elitist operation. They seek to connect with audiences, to expand the repertoire into non-classical regions, to meet listeners at least half way, and sometimes even more. Yes, they want to move you and even challenge you occasionally, but they also want to entertain you. They care if you listen.

Sounds sickening, doesn’t it? Not with Kremer’s taste as guiding light. It’s never low-brow, mid-brow, or even populist, even when it’s pop. Call it cosmopolitan.

One listened to this entire concert in assessing mode, the most active and participatory form of listening. The ears were kept on their toes.

Kremer and the orchestra again mined what has been a rich source for them over the years, the music of Eastern Europe and Russia. Šernšnyte’s “De Profundis” (she was born in Lithuania in 1975) opened the agenda. A minimalist-tinged essay in jagged, syncopated fragments and post-Romantic harmonies, it manages to reach something very near the heights, and depths, of its title. The Kremerata Baltica, sans Kremer and conductor, played it compellingly.

Pärt’s Passacaglia, for violin solo (Kremer, throughout the evening), string orchestra and vibraphone, combined exquisite orchestration, a far-flung, vistas-opening bass-line, and a sense of Baroque proportion. Auerbach’s “Sogno di Stabat Mater,” for solo violin, viola, vibraphone and strings, manipulated Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” sometimes recalling it fondly, sometimes jacking up its dissonances and intensity.

In the event, Tickmayer’s “After Glenn Gould” was replaced by Georgs Pelecis’s “Flowering Jasmine,” for solo violin, vibraphone and strings, a lovely, pop-inflected bon mot.

The vibraphone (played sensitively by Andrei Pushkarev) proved a perfect, glowing foil for the strings in every piece in which it appeared. Kremer, when he soloed, hardly preened or swooned, opting instead for smooth, quiet, tasteful authority. The Kremerata Baltica, 23-strong, average age 27, all from the Baltic states, sounded splendidly reverberant in the Segerstrom acoustic.

Leavening the adventure was more adventure, in the form of Schubert and Beethoven. The 16-year-old Schubert’s Minuet in D minor (D. 89), originally for string quartet, here arranged for solo violin, vibraphone and string orchestra, emerged as the program’s pinnacle, a sneaky-dark rumination, dispatched oh-so gorgeously.

The finale, an arrangement for string orchestra of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, with Kremer in the driver’s seat, didn’t work so well. All involved gave it the old college try, but the composer’s interior journey became exterior, the solo lines played en masse became fatiguing to the ear, and the turn-on-a-dime contrasts in the original became less abrupt. Perhaps only the last movement gained something in ruggedness and ferocity by this pumping up of numbers.

Oh well. The cool and snazzy encore was Piazzolla’s “Michelangelo 70.” A good time was had by those who came.

Next up: The Philharmonic Society of Orange County presents violinist Robert McDuffie and the Venice Baroque Orchestra performing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” and Philip Glass’s “The American Seasons” on November 4.