ON A freezing morning in Hamburg I am sipping coffee with the man whom Herbert von Karajan called “the greatest violinist alive”. But all is not well with Gidon Kremer. He can’t quite be described as disgruntled. But, as P. G. Wodehouse might have said, he’s not exactly gruntled either.
He is halfway through an intensive tour with Kremerata Baltica, the orchestra he founded eight years ago. But exhaustion has not caused his unease. His trouble is disillusion. After 35 years at the top, and with his incisive style and tireless championing of new music still winning glowing reviews, he has lost faith in the music business.
“I feel like a Martian,” he says. “I have such a different view of music-making from today’s promoters that I seem to be on a different planet. I want to move on, but the musical establishment wants me to move backwards.”
You can understand the problem by looking at what Kremer will play on Monday, when he returns to the Wigmore Hall for the first time in 21 years. True, there’s a bit of Bach and some Piazzolla tangos to woo the crowds. But the concert also includes such quixotic divertissements as Lubos Fiser’s Crux Duo for Violin and Kettledrum, as well as the inevitable slab of dark Russian irony from Alfred Schnittke. Among the world’s top fiddlers, Kremer is unique in regularly confronting the public with such unknown oddities.
“I still hold a belief in promoting music that is less well known, but serious and valuable,” he says. “But now the audiences are so attuned to fast-food music, easy listening, immediate gratification. I am a Latvian but I spent many years studying in Russia. And in Riga and Moscow I was instilled with the feeling that music has a meaning. In other words, I was born into a world in which music was valued not just for its market worth. If you are saying that times are different now, I would say that maybe it is a good thing my sunset as a performer coincides with this time, because I won’t regret not being part of it any more.”
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Kremer’s critics, and perhaps also his friends, would point out that he has been disgruntled before. Highly intelligent, highly complex and as tightly strung as his Guarneri, he never fitted into the Soviet musical establishment after winning the 1970 Tchaikovsky Competition. But when he left the Soviet Union in 1980, he found that capitalism — and its effects on music — made him as uneasy as communism. “Soloists,” he once observed, “have become like fashion models.” I don’t think he meant that as a compliment.
What now exacerbates his unease, however, is a problem partly of his own making: his loyalty towards his young orchestra. It has sapped his time, energy and, increasingly, his finances. Now his worry about the Kremerata Baltica’s future is clearly casting a large shadow over his life.
He founded it in 1997 not only as a 50th birthday present to himself but as a gesture of support, as a Latvian, for the three newly independent Baltic states. His idea was to establish a permanent, properly paid band for outstanding young Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian string players (he says that the Baltic states are not yet turning out wind players of the quality he requires, so he recruits them from elsewhere on an ad hoc basis). And the Kremerata is a success. It tours the world for five months a year (it came to the Proms in 2001), makes award-winning recordings and plays the sort of quirky programmes that older, more cynical orchestras would not touch with a proverbial trombone-slide. What’s more, the rapport between the players (many of whom have been with Kremer for all eight years) is now so close as to verge on the intuitive.
The only problem is that, in accountancy parlance, the numbers don’t stack up. With endearing candour, Kremer spells out the stark figures. “The players are paid a tiny salary by Western European standards — about £300 a month — though that is five times what they would earn in another Baltic orchestra. But the various Baltic culture ministries give us only the smallest financial support, and the payments usually arrive late. So 96 per cent of our budget we have to raise ourselves, either through performing or private support.”
The good news is that the orchestra has generous private support. The bad news is that this generous private individual is Kremer himself.
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“From the start,” he says, “I made it a rule that I would never get more than 50 per cent of my normal fee when I play with Kremerata. But more and more I play concerts without any fee. Even then there is no certainty that at the end of the year we won’t encounter losses. And I am the one who must make good the deficit. I am the only guarantor.” How much, I ask Kremer, is the deficit likely to be this year? He mentions a substantial five-figure sum.
“Obviously,” Kremer says, “we have to find sponsorship. Without it the orchestra will fall apart. And that will be very sad for the players who have given it eight years of their lives.”
Unfortunately, Kremer is temperamentally incapable of what the Americans call schmoozing. “I am not a snob. I would allow myself to do a little of that if it would help. But I don’t know how. I don’t move in political or business circles. And I have a sad inability to ask very rich people for money. Now, if my name were Justus Frantz . . .”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. Frantz is renowned throughout the musical world as a man with a very modest talent for conducting and a very large one for fundraising. The result is that Frantz’s “Philharmonia of the Nations” has played more than 1,000 boring and unnecessary concerts under his baton across the world.
“I also see what support my colleagues in Russia get,” Kremer continues. “Spivakov with his two orchestras, Bashmet with his Moscow Soloists. There is yet another new symphony orchestra in Moscow now — all paid for by ‘New Russian’ billionaires, not all of them called Abramovich.
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“How do these conductors do it? They obviously know the game they must play; they know the key words and the key moves they must make. They know the parties they must give to make the New Russians happy. But I give all my energies to music, to composers, to my young colleagues.”
Kremer looks so desperate that, for a moment, I wonder if he wants me to give him advice. But what advice could I give? The pragmatic course would be to accept that the Kremerata is an impossible dream.
But what sort of musical world is it that forces one of the few remaining idealists in the business, and a performing giant as well, to give up his ideals? In “New Russian” terms, what the Kremerata requires is small change: £100,000 a year would make a big difference. In other words, a Premiership footballer’s wage for a fortnight.
So who knows? Perhaps Mr Abramovich will yet be the answer to a fiddler’s prayer. It would certainly be fun to watch Chelsea running out at Stamford Bridge to the moody strains of Schnittke and Piazzolla.