Gidon Kremer is a Soviet, Latvian, later German violinist and conductor, born on February 27, 1947, in Riga. He is also the founder of the chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica and the author of several books.
He was born into a family of violinists. His father, Markus Kremer, was of Jewish origin, a prisoner of the Riga Ghetto, and a Holocaust survivor. His mother, Marianna Kremer, had Swedish-German and Jewish background. His grandfather Karl Bruckner was a violinist, musicologist, and music teacher. Because of his wife's Jewish origin, the family had been forced to emigrate from Germany to Estonia in 1935 and was later evacuated to Alma-Ata during the early years of the Second World War. In 1945 they settled in Riga, where Kremer's parents married that same year.
At the age of four, Kremer began studying the violin with his father and grandfather. He studied at the Emils Darzins Music School in Riga and graduated in 1969 from the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied violin with David Oistrakh. He has performed publicly since 1965.
After graduating from the conservatory, he achieved major success in international competitions. In 1969 he won first prize at the Paganini International Violin Competition in Genoa and second prize at the Montreal International Competition for performers, shared with Oleg Krysa. In 1970 he became the winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition among violinists. For many years he played Stradivari and Guarneri violins; in later years he performed on a 1641 Amati instrument.
In 1980 Kremer emigrated from the Soviet Union to West Germany. In 1981 he founded a chamber music festival in Lockenhaus, Austria, and remained its permanent artistic leader until 2011. In 1997 he founded the chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica, made up of young performers from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Ukraine. He later organized the concert "With Love to Russia," held in Berlin on October 7, 2013, as a sign of solidarity with victims of violence and human rights violations in Russia. In 2018 he created a new interdisciplinary project, "One on One with Photographs," combining music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg with works by the Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus.
His repertoire includes works by both classical and contemporary composers. He collaborated with composers including Astor Piazzolla, Philip Glass, Alfred Schnittke, Georgs Pelecis, Leonid Desyatnikov, Alexander Raskatov, Alexander Vustin, Lera Auerbach, Peteris Vasks, Arvo Part, Viktoriia Poleva, Roberto Carnevale, John Coolidge Adams, and Giya Kancheli. He was also an important advocate of the music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg.
Kremer is the author of several books, among them Shards of Childhood, People's Artist, Overtones, and Confession of a Miragist (2013). Among his distinctions are the State Prize of the Russian Federation for 1995, two Great Music Awards of Latvia, a Grammy Award in 2001 for the album After Mozart with Kremerata Baltica, the Ernst von Siemens Prize, the Leonie Sonning Music Prize, the Imperial Prize, and high state orders from Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Estonia, Poland, and Romania.
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