Soulful Art Versus Escapism at the Movies

**** “Le Cinema”

Gidon Kremer, violin; Oleg Maisenberg, piano;

Andrey Boreyko, conductor,

Germany Symphony Orchestra Berlin

Teldec

*

“Cinema Serenade 2: The Golden Age”

Itzhak Perlman, violin;

John Williams, conductor,

Boston Pops Orchestra

Sony Classical

*

Thirty years ago, Kremer and Perlman were obviously at the head of their generation’s class, the two young violinists universally recognized as having the potential for greatness. Now in their 50s, Perlman has become the world’s most famous violinist, while Kremer has developed the reputation for being the most unpredictable and questing of any major classical star. And what better way to get a feel for just what kinds of musicians they have become than to go to the movies with them?

One need only compare the one selection common to both discs, Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile” from “Modern Times.” Kremer begins his CD with it in a slow, haunting, arrestingly poignant performance of an arrangement for violin and piano by Claus Ogermann. Perlman plays it with an offhanded, fancy delicacy in a fussy version for violin and orchestra by Williams. Both are nostalgic renditions, but Kremer’s is a soul-searching nostalgia, an attempt to understand a culture; Perlman’s is a sentimental nostalgia, an easy remembrance of an old hit parade.

“For me, the cinema is an art,” Kremer writes in the introduction to his probing disc, and he goes on to prove it with music that represents the cinema but doesn’t reproduce it. His fascinating collection includes a heart-stopping performance of a Piazzolla tango from the Italian film “Enrico IV” starring Marcello Mastroianni; a gripping performance of Toru Takemitsu’s “Nostalghia”; a tribute to the late Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky; a fabulously hellbent attack on Milhaud’s “cinema-fantasy,” “Le Boeuf sur le Toit”; and music by Nino Rota and Shostakovich.

Perlman and Williams, on the other hand, have followed up one previously uninspired but best-selling run-through of movie music with another. The music is good--classic music from classic films, including “As Time Goes By” from “Casablanca,” David Raksin’s theme from “Laura” and “Tara’s Theme” from “Gone With the Wind.” But the arrangements are slickly superficial (except for Richard Rodney Bennett’s substantial version of William Walton’s score to Olivier’s “Henry V”), and the playing is facile (except, again, for touching solo work in the Walton). Kremer goes to the movies as an artist expecting to enhance his world; Perlman, too often, seems to go to the movies as an escape from his art.