Gidon Kremer / Yulianna Avdeeva / Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė MIECZYSLAW WEINBERG Chamber Music

Released in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme and POLSKA 100, the international cultural programme celebrating the centenary of Poland regaining independence. 

Supported by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the multi-annual programme NIEPODLEGŁA 2017-2022. 

Gidon Kremer and friends perform three pieces of chamber music by the Polish-born Soviet composer, including an outstanding account of the Piano Trio.

Following the success of the Weinberg Symphonies 2 & 21 with conductor Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Deutsche Grammophon now features chamber music by Mieczysław Weinberg under the direction of Gidon Kremer.

Included among others are his “Three Pieces for Violin and Piano”, which Weinberg completed in the winter of 1934/35 when he was only 15 years old and had not yet received any compositional training.

What connects Weinberg’s works is not only their compositional perfection, but above all their constant commitment to beauty. It is a confession that in Weinberg’s music is above all pain and suffering.

Yulianna Avdeeva JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

This magnificent programme of three of Bach’s keyboard masterpieces begins with the English Suite no.2 in A minor BWV 807. But why ‘English’? Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, whose source of information was the composer’s two eldest sons, speaks of ‘Six great Suites, consisting of preludes, allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, gigues, etc. They are known by the name of English Suites because the composer wrote them for an Englishman of rank’. Bach’s exchanges with British musicians, ‘of rank’ or otherwise, would seem to have been tenuous in the extreme. Having reflected at length on the question, scholars have come to think that this Englishman of rank might have been the . . . French musician François Dieupart, known as Charles. He lived in London for the greater part of his life, and died there around 1740. The reasoning behind this is that Bach quotes a motif borrowed from Dieupart in the Prélude to the very first suite. He had even copied out in his own hand, among other French and Italian scores, the six Suites de Clavessin of Dieupart, which date from the early years of the century and follow the same scheme as the six English Suites. So could Dieupart have been the ‘Englishman of rank’ to whom Bach was therefore paying tribute, or actually dedicating his work? Or, which seems more plausible, was it the example of Dieupart’s suites that prompted him to write a set of six suites in his turn?... (Excerpt from the liner Notes)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica MIECZYSLAW WEINBERG Chamber Symphonies - Piano Quintet

In 2014 ECM New Series featured Kremerata Baltica in a widely-praised album dedicated to the music of Mieczysław Weinberg. Now Gidon Kremer’s orchestra continues the story, turning its attention to the four chamber symphonies completed in the last decade of the Polish-born Soviet composer’s life. The arc of the album – recorded in Vienna and in Riga in June 2015 – also embraces a striking new arrangement, by Gidon Kremer and Kremerata percussionist Andrey Pushkarev, of Weinberg’s early Piano Quintet.

In his recollection of Mieczysław Weinberg in the liner notes, fellow composer Alexander Raskatov speaks of the “incredible renaissance” of Weinberg’s music, a revival which might well have amazed its author. Since his death in 1996, Weinberg’s work has been widely re-evaluated, with Gidon Kremer and Kremeratica Baltica have been among the artists calling for broader recognition for a composer who “strongly opposed any division of music into avant-garde and ‘arrière-garde’, as Raskatov remembers.

The Kremer/Pushkarev arrangement of the Piano Quintet op. 18 extends the creative spirit of Weinberg’s reworkings of his own material: each of his chamber symphonies developed earlier music and took it to new places. The kernel of the Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1986) can be found in Weinberg’s Second String Quartet, written 45 years earlier. “He continued the process,” writes David Fanning in the liner notes, “by reworking his Third String Quartet as Chamber Symphony No. 2 and his Fifth String Quartet as Chamber Symphony No. 3. These were all rehabilitations of previously unpublished works. Finally he added the profoundly introspective Chamber Symphony No. 4, his last completed opus, based not on a string quartet but on several of his late works,”

Weinberg’s chamber symphonies are, Gidon Kremer says, “the most personal reflections of a great composer on his own life and his generation, like a diary of the most dramatic period of the 20th century.”

The violinist considers the present Weinberg recording “the most valuable landmark” in Kremerata Baltica’s discography, and the album is released in time for a major tour celebrating both the orchestra’s 20th anniversary as well as its leader’s 70th birthday. Weinberg’s compositions form an integral part of the orchestra’s concert repertoire in the current season. (ECM Records)

Yulianna Avdeeva / Orchestra of the 18th Century / Frans Brüggen CHOPIN Piano Concertos 1 & 2

The National Institute Frederyck Chopin has already released a massive box set of Chopin's complete works performed on instruments of the composer's time, and that included recordings of both of these concertos with Frans Brüggen and the Orchestra of the 18th Century; the Dutch musicians have become regular visitors to the Chopin and His Europe festival in Warsaw each summer. The institute has now released another period-instrument disc of the concertos with the same conductor and orchestra, but the soloist this time is Yulianna Avdeeva, the highly rated winner of the most recent International Chopin Piano Competition, which took place in the Polish capital in 2010.

For the recordings Avdeeva plays a renovated Erard piano built in Paris in 1849, reckoned to be practically identical to instruments that Chopin knew and played. For its sound alone, it's a fascinating document; the Erard, with its lean, incisive lower register and a crisply defined treble that has just a hint of percussive edge, is wonderfully profiled against the vibrato-free string textures of the orchestra so that not a single detail is missed. But these performances are much more than exercises in historical reconstruction, however intriguing the soundworld they create. Avdeeva's recital appearances in Britain have yet to demonstrate why her competition victory created such a stir, but there's no doubt of the quality of the artistic imagination at work here.

Whether it's in the bold, dramatic shapes that she creates in the first movements of both works, the energy with which she propels the two finales, or the spellbinding beauty of her playing in the central Larghettos, their tracery delicately crystalline and their lyricism airy and unfettered, there seems to be a real spontaneity about Avdeeva's approach. It's as if by performing these works on a very different instrument from the usual modern concert grand she's discovering a new range of possibilities, a new palette of keyboard colours. Her performances may not quite rival the all-time classic versions on record, but they do offer fresh and hugely rewarding alternatives. (The Guardian)

Yulianna Avdeeva CHOPIN Preludes Op. 28 SCHUBERT Three Klavierstücke D. 946 PROKOFIEV Piano Sonata No. 7

Four years after winning the 2010 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw – the first woman to do so since Martha Argerich in 1965 – Yulianna Avdeeva makes her debut solo recording (she has recorded both Chopin concertos on an Erard piano for the Fryderyk Chopin Institute). She begins with Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke, D946, surely intended to be a third set of four Impromptus had not death intervened; Brahms entitled them Klavierstücke when his edition was published in 1868. Alternatively, one could see them as a three-movement sonata. Whatever your view, from the first bar Avdeeva makes you sit up and take note. Here is an artist who can truly make the piano sing – and to no greater effect than in the A flat minor Trio of No 2. In the opinion of the pianist this is ‘one of the most personal and moving statements in all classical music’. The way she plays this, you might find yourself agreeing.

The second of Prokofiev’s three ‘War Sonatas’ opens with a movement marked Allegro inquieto (‘restless’, ‘nervy’). Avdeeva sacrifices its unsettling character for beauty of tone and exemplary voicing, its spikier passages seeming almost jaunty. The central movement, with its cello-like main theme, is captivating. Where she is less than persuasive is in the finale, among the most electrifying of the genre. Precipitato Prokofiev instructs, implying danger – I think of it as someone fleeing from an implacable foe with its relentless, threatening quaver B flat/crotchet C/quaver B flat motif. Richter, who gave the first performance in 1943, is still supreme (his 1958 recording). Avdeeva gives us Prokofiev-lite, a smooth ride in a fast machine.

Disc 2 has just the 24 Preludes. There is much to commend here, not least Avdeeva’s consistently clear singing quality, a joy to hear and very well captured by Mirare in a natural acoustic. It’s a fine account but in some of the quieter Preludes (eg Nos 4 and 6) her asynchronous melody and accompaniment becomes faintly irritating. In the end others have something more personal to say, not least Cortot (1926) and the forgotten Robert Lortat, whose 1928 recording for Columbia (now on Doremi) deserves to become far better known. (Gramophone)

Yulianna Avdeeva CHOPIN - MOZART - LISZT

Yulianna Avdeeva rose to fame when she won First Prize in the Chopin Competition in 2010. She has since embarked on a world-class career and her artistic integrity is rapidly ensuring her a place amongst the most distinctive artists of her generation.

A regular performer throughout Asia, this autumn Yulianna Avdeeva embarks on a major concert tour of Japan, performing concerts with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and featuring in solo recitals in Korea, Taiwan and China. Avdeeva will also undertake tours of North and South America, including her debut with Montreal Symphony Orchestra and engagements with Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo. Other orchestra highlights include international debuts with leading ensembles such as the Chamber Orchestra of Europe at the Lucerne Festival and the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra, both under the baton of Anu Tali. 

Recent orchestral highlights have included engagements with NHK Symphony Orchestra, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Finnish Radio Symphony, London Philharmonic and Bournemouth Symphony orchestras, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio and concerts at the Vienna Festival. 

Yulianna Avdeeva began her piano studies at the age of five with Elena Ivanova at Moscow’s Gnessin Special School of Music and later studied with Konstantin Scherbakov and with Vladimir Tropp. At the International Piano Academy Lake Como, she was taught among others by William Grant Naboré, Dmitri Bashkirov and Fou Ts’ong. In addition to her Chopin prize, she has won several other prizes including the Bremen Piano Contest in 2003, the Concours de Genève 2006 and the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Poland.
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