Kalabis: Duettina, Chamber music & Diptych

Composer and works may be unfamiliar, but Viktor Kalabis's Duettina, Chamber music & Diptych are very much the sort of repertoire in which Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica (to both of whom Hyperion extends the warmest of welcomes) specialize. All three works date from the second half of the twentieth century, and if the influence of figures such as Martinů, Bartók and Berg may be heard in the background, that isn't to deny the individuality of Kalabis's own compositional voice-one which emerges as determinedly, defiantly tonal. This is a powerful album which will repay repeated listening as well as introducing a wider audience to a lesser-known Czech composer.

Gidon Kremer's commitment to the music of our own time and the exploration of some of the lesser-known byways of the past is justly famous. Here, alongside his Kremerata Baltica colleagues, he turns his attention to three substantial works for strings by the twentieth-century Czech composer Viktor Kalabis. This is an album guaranteed to win new friends for the music.