MUSIC REVIEW : KREMER, AFANASSIEV IN RECITAL AT AMBASSADOR

Gidon Kremer has been playing his violin here, in a number of visits to Southern California, for the best part of a decade. But only Thursday night did the Latvian-born musician get around to playing at Ambassador Auditorium. Kremer made his Pasadena debut with a full and satisfying program, and with a pianistic partner matching his own musical stature.

That is saying a lot. At 39, Kremer’s unrelenting seriousness, technical accomplishment and musical integrity are unquestioned. He plays standard works with freshness and probity, and seeks out the virtues in works by living composers. Because of his curiosity and appetite for the unusual, he is not predictable as an artist.

His cohort in Pasadena was Valery Afanassiev, a pianist and virtuoso who followed Kremer at the Moscow Conservatory by several years, and whose musical viewpoint seems similar.

Their program turned out to be more or less conventional, but played with enough brio, intensity and musical involvement to hold the interest of a connoisseur (and smallish) audience. It offered Mozart’s E-flat Sonata, K. 481, Brahms’ Second Sonata, Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy (the composer’s spelling) and the Fantasy in C by Schubert.

The performance revealed cherishable Mozartean statements and polished Mozartean details, and an unorthodox approach to Brahms’ wondrous A-major Sonata, one in which all three movements became slow ones. Just this once--because Kremer/Afanassiev did it so convincingly, and caressed every passage so lovingly--one was ready to accept this Brahmsian indulgence.

More analytical and pragmatic was the duo’s revival of the Schoenberg work, but also one which operated on a clear level of logic and communication, as well as technical superiority. The program-closing Schubert work provided many handsome moments, but none of the musical compulsion or lyric urgency which had marked the ensemble’s playing of Brahms.

In response to noisy approbation of the audience, the duo gave three encores: first, the arrangement (1925) of George Gershwin’s “Novelettes” by Samuel Dushkin, called “Short Story”; second, an Andante and Allegretto by Mozart, third, Fritz Kreisler’s “Little Viennese March.”