Info:
Duration: 58’ 52”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 1999
Gidon Kremer is known to musicians the world over as a man who has new ideas, and good ones.
This film by Christopher Nupen looks at some of those ideas - in particular Gidon Kremer's very unusual and long-running Lockenhaus Festival and his most passionately held new idea, the Kremerata Baltica. It is an Allegro Film in a long tradition of intimate portraits of performing musicians, full of life, movement and very good music, almost all of it written in the twentieth century but all of it with immediate appeal.
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The locations are London, Gstaad, Lugano and the Lockenhaus festival which Gidon Kremer founded in 1981. A major feature of the film is the Kremerata Baltica. This recently-formed orchestra of young people (the average age is 22) from Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania is Gidon Kremer's most intensely felt current project and he has already taken the orchestra on four highly successful international tours. The commitment of these young people is heartening and their music-making, under Gidon Kremer's guidance, is on a very high level indeed with a success story to match.
Another theme is Gidon Kremer's passionate advocacy of the music of Astor Piazzolla with which he has had so much success in recent years. His CD, Hommage à Piazzolla (with his Astor Quartet) reached the top of the classical charts in Germany, Austria and Japan within six weeks of its release and has gone on to achieve pop-record sales levels.
Kremer is widely known also as a very thoughtful musician and a convincing talker who has published several books. The film includes revealing interviews with him but its prime focus is on the work, the music and his young friends rather than on biographical details or critical reflections on music and music making.
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