MUSIC REVIEW : Kremer, Grindenko Shine

At the end of a severe program, one that happened to be abundantly satisfying as well as a heavy load of listening, violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko stopped their audience on the way out the door to exhume some prime Paganini.

Paganini? After an evening of Nono, Berio, Stockhausen, Prokofiev, Biber and Bach? Yes, Paganini. For sure.

The smallish audience, which had listened raptly to, and seemed to have appreciated thoroughly, the serious and the avant-gardish, loved this set of variations on “Carnival of Venice”--which sounded like Paganini’s transcription for violin and guitar, only ornamented and jazzed up.

It was a most amusing display piece. And it capped an engrossing night in Royce Hall at UCLA with smiles all around.

Kremer and Grindenko--they were married to each other for six years, two decades ago--brought to the technical hurdles and in-jokes of this transcription the same panorama of musical/emotive devices they had lavished earlier upon duo works by Prokofiev and Nono and on pieces for violin alone by Biber, Bach and Stockhausen.

The most fascinating of the lot was the newest, the late Luigi Nono’s last completed work, “ ‘Hay que caminar’ sognando,” for two violins (1990).

It is a 19-minute duet; one can read into the mostly slow-moving atonal rhetoric strong hints of pessimism, alienation and Angst, if one wishes, or merely an extreme pensiveness.

The two fiddlers enter the stage from opposite sides, wander briefly, then take up posts at different stations, where parts of the score are held on music stands. During the length of the piece, they exchange positions twice more, then wander offstage, separately. The bilingual title, which the composer has translated, “We must go forth, dreaming,” may give some clues to Nono’s intended meaning(s).

Most rewarding was Kremer’s hair-raising performance of Bach’s Chaconne from the D-minor Partita, an account of boldness, strength and authority that did not discount the quieter, more reflective parts of the score. If anyone still needs proof, 14 years after Kremer’s first appearance here, that the Latvian-born virtuoso is the leading violinist of his generation, this was it.

Fascinating too was Kremer’s revival of excerpts from Stockhausen’s exotic “Melodies From ‘Zodiac,’ ” in the solo violin version. Also, Grindenko’s assured, communicative and technically unflappable playing of both a G-minor Passacaglia by Biber and Berio’s “Sequenza VIII” (1976) for violin alone, a cherishable soliloquy even when played less expertly than Grindenko played it here.

Before the “Carnival of Venice” festivities, the program proper ended with Prokofiev’s Sonata in C for two violins (1932).