Gustav Mahler, Dimitri Shostakovich, Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica

This disc pairs two late works written in times of personal crisis: the Adagio from Gustav Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony (1910) and Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14 (1969), for soprano, bass and chamber orchestra. Both are played by Kremerata Baltica, the chamber orchestra founded in 1997 under the direction of Gidon Kremer, and the album appeared in its tenth year. Kremer leads from the first violin desk rather than from a podium.

The Mahler was recorded in Riga in October 2001, in an adaptation for strings by Hans Stadlmair and the orchestra itself. The Shostakovich is a concert recording from the Musikverein in Vienna in November 2004, captured by the Austrian radio ORF. The soloists are the soprano Yulia Korpacheva and the bass Fyodor Kuznetsov. The orchestral parts include two double basses, percussion and celesta, with Kremer as leader of the first violins. The album is a co-production of ECM, Kremerata Baltica and ORF.

Shostakovich dedicated the Fourteenth to Benjamin Britten. Its eleven movements set poems about death by Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Küchelbecker and Rainer Maria Rilke, with an orchestra of strings, percussion and celesta. Apollinaire supplies six texts, among them Loreley, the longest movement, At the Santé Jail and the Zaporozhian Cossacks' Reply to the Sultan of Constantinople. Rilke's The Death of the Poet and the short Conclusion close the cycle. In the Mahler, the strings-only texture brings out, in the words of one reviewer, links back to Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht and forward to Strauss's Metamorphosen.

Calum MacDonald, in BBC Music Magazine, heard "an extremely dramatic and atmospheric performance" of the Shostakovich. He found no loss of scale but a more intimate feel, praised both soloists, and noted that the live audience barely disturbs the tension. The Evening Standard wrote that "Kremer's violin acts as a microscope staring into the scurrying microbes of the composer's final thoughts" in the Mahler. Franz Cavigelli in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag thought Kremer's reading, joining refined expression with chamber intimacy, hard to surpass. The Vienna paper Kurier called it one of the best Kremer recordings in a long time.

CD edition, ECM New Series 2024, first released in August 2007. The booklet has an essay by Inna Barsova, translated by J. Bradford Robinson.