MUSICIAN OF PURITY

A Munich Edition Commemorates Violinist Oleg Kagan

Only a few knew Oleg Kagan, the Russian violinist who died in summer 1990 aged 43, to be the outstanding musician he in fact was. There are various reasons for that. One was that he personally was much too modest to be interested in stirring up sensation and grand audiences, too modest to indulge stardom. Probably making music to Oleg Kagan meant an emphatic interchange with human beings that culminated in his ability to friendship with other musicians, in joint playing and performing.

This had consequences: he played a lot of contemporary music in close relation and cooperation with their composers who were his friends (Gubaidulina, Schnittke, or Denisov); he loved chamber music in every cast (his most important partners were Natalia Gutman, his wife, Sviatoslav Richter and Yuri Bashmet). But above all Oleg Kagan was certainly more of a musician than of a pure virtuoso although his technical capacity on the violin was considered outstanding. Nevertheless his emphasis never lays on his skills - he never stopped striving for creative improvement. Kagan's significantly string intensity that became even more obvious after his death eventually stemmed from friendship. A concrete example is the chamber music festival in Kreuth at the Lake of Tegernsee Kagan and his Russian musician colleagues had the opportunity to found in Germany in the late eighties. Even in the old Soviet Union the musicians had established a private summer festival in the medieval town of Zvenigorod. Now that the political ice was melting and, as a consequence, cultural activities came to new life the friends again wanted to perform together. Thus they enjoyed to be in the green idyll of Bavarian Wildbad Kreuth as warmly treated guest of their Munich friends. Oleg Kagan, however, had known since 1989 that he was fatally ill. Very shortly after the end of the first Festival Summer in Kreuth, he died.

This year for the third time the friends organized the Chamber Music Festival Wildbad Kreuth - a great success. And again, those who realised an Oleg Kagan Edition on compact discs, were friends. The label's name is "Live Classics". It comprises recordings not only from Kreuth and the Soviet Union but also from the Chamber Music Festival in Northern Finnish Kuhmo where Kagan and his pals performed as early as the seventies.

Among them are selected violin sonatas with Sviatoslav Richter playing the piano. These recordings, taken during concerts in Moscow in the early seventies, are a document for the marvellous musical symbiosis of the two artists. The fact that Richter, in memory of Oleg Kagan, gave solo recitals playing works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, turned out to be a gift to Live Classics CDs. A perturbing, somewhat terrifying, deep and almost bitter seriousness is cast over Mozart's fantasy in c-minor; Beethoven's rarely performed sonata in F major with only two movements that he recorded in Kreuth last summer turns into a piece of stringent magnitude under Richter's hands. There are other new CDs available with Richter as a soloist, playing selected piano music of Bach, and Beethoven sonatas No. 109 and No. 110. These are live recordings from other concert halls. The recordings of Elisso Wirssaladze who also was member of the circle of friends are of comparable quality. She also performs as a partner of Natalia Gutman - in this case in an impetuous and virtuoso interpretation of Brahms' e-minor cello sonata and the cello sonata by Edvard Grieg.

Who can tell which paths Oleg Kagan would yet have taken, how he had developed further as an artist had he not died two years ago? Stages of maturity are usually only milestones on a long way. Kagan's way was cut off abruptly. Only a few weeks before his death he played, in a public rehearsal, Beethoven's Violin Concerto in the Munich Philharmonic Hall with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra under Sergio Celebidache. The concert on the same evening the artist was forced to cancel, marked by his illness. Those who have heard him during this late morning hour tell us about a performance unprecedented in intensity and spirit. There seems to be no recording of this event.

Another hint for Kagan's ultimate state of maturity renders the 1984 recording of Messiaens' quartet "for the end of time" which was written down in a war's prisoner camp during the Second World War, bearing the title "Quatuor pour la fin du temps". His partners are the cellist Natalia Gutman, clarinetist Eduard Brunner and pianist Vassily Lobanov. Here, Kagan's qualities as a chamber music player are audible once again, in the same way they become obvious in his interpretation of Gubaidulina's duet for violin and cello "Rejoice" with Natalia Gutman: they lie in his ability to listen to music within the four dimensions of time and space - and to be near when it evolves from the depths of creation.

Wolfgang Schreiber
Süddeutsche Zeitung 12/92
Translation Live Classics