Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra launched their two-week North American tour over the weekend with performances at Seattle's Benaroya Hall on Friday and at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, California, on Sunday. The tour program features works from the group's latest Nonesuch release, De Profundis, which NPR has called "fantastic" and likened to "a fascinating mix tape, with a surprise around every corner."

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With the tour taking Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica to the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, California, tonight, the performers are featured in an article in the Los Angeles Times.

In the article, music Critic Mark Swed writes that the chamber orchestra has lived up to its founder's hopes for it, namely "to break down any musical barriers still standing, delve even more deeply into the essence of music than he already had, have a little fun and presumably get precise GPS bearings on the fountain of youth." The group, writes Swed, "has brought to vibrant life a treasury of spiritually intense Eastern European music." Further diversifying their repertoire, the Kremerata Baltica now adds the "profound, pioneering" De Profundis.

Though the focus of the article is on the orchestra, Swed points out that it, in fact, "represents all that Kremer is." He writes of the violinist and music director:

Kremer, who introduced the mystical Estonian Arvo Pärt and Russian polystylist Arnold Schnittke to the West in the 1970s, continues to promote music of great importance from many places. John Adams wrote his Violin Concerto for Kremer. I can't think of another soloist before the public today who has Kremer's combination of depth and breadth—and technique.

With De Profundis, Kremer aims "to open our minds to divine influences," writes Swed. The album performance of Michael Nyman's "Trysting Fields" in particular will "melt your heart."

Read the complete article at latimes.com. (The article also looks at the Brooklyn-based chamber orchestra the Knights, with whom Nonesuch artist singer/songwriter/violinist Christina Courtin has played.)

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Time Out Chicago gives De Profundis four stars. The album's "achievement is sequencing 12 diverse pieces into a slow-moving fog of heartbreak and spirituality," writes reviewer Mia Clarke. Whether it’s Sibelius’s evocative tone poem 'Scene with Cranes' leading into Arvo Pärt’s searing Passacaglia, or a Schumann Fugue following Michael Nyman’s Trysting Fields, Kremer’s ear and emotions are in perfect sync." Read the review at chicago.timeout.com.

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Kremer was recently featured in a Denver Post preview of tomorrow night's concert at Denver's Newman Cener. Kremer gives the Post's fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan a sense of what to expect on the program, featuring pieces both from the new album and the group's eclectic repertoire. One thing is likely: expect the unexpected.

"Gidon Kremer has never been one to do things the usual way," writes MacMillan. "Indeed, no single classical artist, especially one of his international renown, has done more in the past half-century to promote composers ranging from Alfred Schnittke and John Adams to Luigi Nono and Astor Piazzolla."

The article notes that, with the Kremerata Baltica, the violinist has been able to expand that spirit from his solo career. "He has transferred much of that adventuresome spirit to the chamber orchestra he founded in 1997," MacMillan writes. "Like Kremer, the orchestra performs traditional repertoire, but it never fails to venture in unexpected directions, as its latest thematic album, De Profundis, makes clear."

Read the complete article at denverpost.com.

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Seattle's Crosscut, reviewing the performers' tour opener at Benaroya Hall, says: "The concert crackled with the sense of inspired adventure that is their trademark." Crosscut's Thomas May says that Kremer "remains a vital advocate of innovative thinking about the repertory." The Kremerata Baltica, for its part, "has a way of retuning your listening patterns and refreshing your ears. Above all, familiar repertory and contemporary music come across as parts of the same vital and ongoing conversation. That may well be the most significant legacy Kremer is passing on to this young generation."

Read the concert review at crosscut.com.

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For more tour information, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour. To pick up a copy of De Profundis, with high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s of the complete album included at checkout, head to the Nonesuch Store.