Interview with violinist Gidon Kremer before his concert in Munich

He belonged to the artistic elite of the Soviet Union and was soon a star in the West: Violinist Gidon Kremer on the feeling of being exploited as a musician in a dictatorship – and art in times of war.

You could talk to him for hours about musical details, but this time it’s about something more earthly. The great violinist Gidon Kremer, born in the Latvian capital Riga in 1947, is currently also busy with political issues. On a cold, wet evening he sits in a Berlin café, speaks calmly and thoughtfully; you can feel that he is not just superficially concerned with world news, but that the theaters of war, especially in the areas of the former Soviet Union, are very close to him. On January 25th, together with another politically active classical music star, the pianist Evgeny Kissin, and other artists, he will play works by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who was as prominent as he was ostracized in the Soviet Union, in the Hercules Hall in Munich.