Considering how good this disc’s performers are – violinists Gidon Kremer and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, both sensational players with huge personalities, plus Kremer’s talented young chamber ensemble Kremerata Baltica – it’s impressive how excruciating a listen it still manages to be.
The two featured works are Chiaroscuro (2010) and Twilight (2004) by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli. Crude, moody harmonic slabs butt up against wan, sickly sweet expanses: imagine a claustrophobic mashup of schmaltzy melodies and angsty outbursts with a thumping bass drum at every clunky suture.
“I write for myself,” Kancheli explains in his sleeve notes, “without having any illusions that ‘beauty will save the world’,” and he makes a keen point of his music’s “deliberate simplicity”. Simplicity would be lovely: instead the textures of Chiaroscuro are dank and smudgy, and any spacious moments in Twilight are undermined by grim cliches. A weird mix of vacuous and inflated, murky and saccharine all at once.
