Kremer Vs. Kremer : Artistry Takes a Toll for the Man Called the Greatest Living Violinist

Gidon Kremer would seem to have everything: artistic integrity that keeps him from being a slave to the commercial concert world, fabled virtuosity as a performer, musical adventurism that results in finding ever-new horizons--and not least, the power to write his own ticket.

To wit, Ernest Fleischmann has put the Los Angeles Philharmonic virtually at Kremer’s service, in specialty programs at UCLA designed by the Latvian violinist and featuring members of his Soviet coterie: co-violinist/ex-wife Tatiana Grindenko and conductor Eri Klas. Tonight, Kremer and Grindenko offer a duo-recital, and Sunday the orchestra accompanies the violinists in two concertos and the first movement of Arvo Part’s “Tabula Rasa.”

But does any of it stave off the “personal struggles” that beset him? Not really.

“People look at what’s visible,” he says on the phone from Cleveland, “and it seems pretty good. The sacrifices that went into those achievements, however, don’t show. What one gives up in his emotional life for being a perfectionist is considerable.”

His story could be called Kremer vs. Kremer, a musician whose very dedication and success cause a sense of inner loss.

When, for instance, the late Herbert von Karajan dubbed him “the greatest living violinist,” he began his ongoing battle with labels and his penchant for staying away from managers who want only to cash in on the cachet.

“They also refer to me as a maverick, an eccentric,” he says, “but it’s not fair to be reduced to a single classification. A person is more than one thing.”

Kremer even endured a scandal that seems ironic to those familiar with his serious musical profile. Following a concert in Rome--one in which the audience was dazzled by his playing of a Mozart concerto--the violinist Uto Ughi ran toward the stage and shouted: “You’re a big clown,” protesting, he said, the “blasphemous” stylistic distortion.

Indeed, all his effort goes toward avoiding rote tradition and instead seeking out “the real challenge--forging something interpretively new.”

Los Angeles audiences remember Kremer’s 1985 account of the Beethoven Concerto; he interpolated a bizarre cadenza by his contemporary, the then little-known Alfred Schnittke, and created shock waves. Since then, and partly due to such championship, the composer has become a big name in the West, with commissions from Carnegie Hall, among others. Similar benefits have fallen to Sofia Gubaidulina, also thanks in part to Kremer.

Nevertheless, some have accused him of deliberately turning things upside down, of causing controversy for its own sake. When he launched his career in the West 14 years ago, he took the stage like a latter-day Paganini--shoulder-length hair flying, a small, lean, agile figure who seemed to be going through a slalom course at each agitated passage.

Now 44, his demeanor is more conservative, but his performances are still at the outer edge of risk-taking and he does little to join the ranks of those satisfied with cultivating nothing more than sumptuous sounds. Last week, the New York Times’ Donal Henahan called his delivery of a Schnittke premiere “scorchingly intense.”

Kremer’s questing factor includes his annual summer festival at Lockenhaus, a little Austrian town bordering Hungary where Andras Schiff, Lucia Popp, Martha Argerich and other discriminating personalities from the pricey quarter play chamber music without pay--for the sheer collegial pleasure he provides.

But the “ups and downs” of his personal life led him to take the yearlong performing sabbatical from which he just emerged: “I went to the North Pole on a Russian nuclear ice-breaker, sans violin, an exciting sea trip. Part of the purpose was to make notes of what I didn’t want to forget from my life.

“On returning, I spent eight hours a day writing, which became another subject of struggle for me (a small, reduced excerpt of his prose appeared in the New York Times April 28). But whether for a reader or a listener what I produce does not yet reach my expectation--maybe one never gets to that point.”

Meanwhile, he finds other satisfactions, in Arvo Part--Estonia’s answer to composer John Adams and the friend who wrote “Tabula Rasa” (on Sunday’s UCLA bill)--and in Luigi Nono’s Duo for the two violinists (on tonight’s agenda), written for them, says Kremer affectionately, “as one of the last pieces he composed before his death.”

As for Grindenko, Kremer’s wife from ’68 to ‘74, he calls her “a very dear friend and superb musician who, only since the open Soviet door, has been able to perform with me in the West.”

Their relationship, he says, “remains intense,” although she is “happily married” (for 15 years) to composer Vladimir Martinow. Kremer’s subsequent, now-terminated marriage--to pianist Elena Bashkirov--also was a partnership, visited upon Los Angeles audiences in 1980.

Except for his close friendships, his searchings for new music and literature, the struggle goes on.

“To be honest as an artist means I must find that link between my emotional and musical life,” he says. “It wouldn’t do to be one more in that overwhelming number of performers who take the easy path, going on automatic pilot to play the same warhorses over and over.”