Gidon Kremer is known to musicians the world over as a man who has new ideas – and good ones. He is known also as one of the liveliest performing musicians in the world today, and the man who has done more for contemporary composers in the last quarter of the twentieth century than any other on his level. His latest and most passionately held idea is the formation of a new orchestra, drawn from the youth of three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. He calls this the Kremerata Baltica and he asked his friend Saulius Sondeckis to help him put it together.
The most striking characteristics of this unusual artist are his individuality, his commitment, his apparently tireless energy and the fact that he collaborates, in many different ways, with more musical friends than perhaps any other international soloists. "Music making is, for me, sharing emotions with friends. I am privileged to have many friends, and now with the Kremerata Baltica I adopted 25 more children or friends or colleagues, potential colleagues, because they are all wonderful and I am happy to be in this family. It's a matter of choice, I could have chosen just to play myself around the world, the same concertos or even some contemporary pieces, or to make music with others, but I think the second thing is more interesting... more challenging," he says.
And he adds: "I don't want to be seen as a violinist. It seems so ridiculous since it's the only tool I am really in control of. I would like to be seen as... someone. A musician, of course, which is for me more than an instrumentalist. A musician, an inspiring force to follow their own paths, their own ideas. Someone that encourage people to do more than they know about themselves, or than they did before they met me. Like with the Kremerata Baltica. I want to be not the father of this orchestra, I want to be their older colleague. I want to help them go further."
