Birthday Party

Birthday and anniversary recordings in the classical music world normally mark considerable longevity but violinist Gidon Kremer decided to mark what was just the fifth birthday of his ensemble Kremerata Baltica, a chamber orchestra of young musicians from the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The disk, simply titled Happy Birthday, is pretty much a party record of immaculately played musical jokes. Musical jokes are notorious for wearing thin very quickly, so this is a disk to be sampled only occasionally but given that qualification it can be a lot of fun. The material that is used for variations in the style of composers and genres could hardly be more familiar e. g. Happy Birthday itself, Auld Lang Syne and God Save The King plus the bizarre McMozart's Eine Kleine Bricht Moonlicht Nicht Musik which combines Mozart's familar theme with even more familiar Scottish melodies. The results vary from the wryly amusing to the laugh out loud funny ( "Shostakovich's" take on Auld Lang Syne for instance ) There are four other items that are played straight on the disk, two by Schnittke and Kupkovic in the same playful mood and two by Kakhidze and Tchaikovsky that are more or less "normal". Kremerata Baltica are an ensemble that plays much serious contemporary music as well as classics but this was just a fun departure to mark an anniversary.