Gidon Kremer, Magdalena Ceple - Kalabis: Duettina, Chamber Music & Diptych (2025)

Gidon Kremer’s commitment to the music of our own time and the exploration of some of the lesser-known byways of the past is justly famous. Here, alongside his Kremerata Baltica colleagues, he turns his attention to three substantial works for strings by the twentieth-century Czech composer Viktor Kalabis. This is an album guaranteed to win new friends for the music.

The art of composition for Czech composer Viktor Kalabis (1923-2006) was about teasing out the technique he needed to express a piece through the process of writing that piece. Kalabis was prolific, writing five symphonies and seven string quartets alongside many concerti and chamber works, and the joy of discovering Kalabis’s music is that of eavesdropping on Kalabis himself discovering the character, as well as the pacing and inner drama, of the music he was imagining inside his head. A composer who very obviously listened to a wide variety of other music, he adored Martinů—but also Alban Berg and Béla Bartók. His music functions tonally, but he concocted a method of his own for weaving twelve-tone thinking through a score, usually with the intention of intensifying harmonic light and shade, or to walk the music along new and more unstable pathways. Whatever worked in terms of moving his musical argument forwards mattered more to him than orientating himself around any prevailing compositional style or way-of-doing.

Whichever technical procedures he adopted, the essence of Kalabis’s music remained the same and retained its instantly recognizable sound. Both Kalabis and his wife, the pioneering Zuzana Růžičková, who was the first harpsichordist to record the complete keyboard works of Bach, refused to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which ruled the country from 1948 to the end of 1989. As a result, Kalabis faced harassment, travel bans and infrequent public performances of his music; oppression was an important influence on much of his work. This political influence, reflected in some of Kalabis’s major works, was all the greater given that Viktor had suffered under the Nazi occupation of his country, having been forced into factory labour, and by Zuzana’s terrifying experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps and in ‘slave labour’. …

Gidon Kremer, violin
Magdalena Ceple, cello
Kremerata Baltica
Fuad Ibrahimov, conductor

TRACKLIST

1. Gidon Kremer;Magdalena Ceple - I. Introduzione
2. Gidon Kremer;Magdalena Ceple - II. Danzetta
3. Gidon Kremer;Magdalena Ceple - III. Serenata
4. Gidon Kremer;Magdalena Ceple - IV. Finale
5. Kremerata Baltica;Fuad Ibrahimov - I. Andantino
6. Kremerata Baltica;Fuad Ibrahimov - II. Allegro vivo
7. Kremerata Baltica;Fuad Ibrahimov - III. Adagio, molto quieto
8. Kremerata Baltica - I. Andante
9. Kremerata Baltica - II. Allegro vivo