THE FIRST TIME I met Gidon Kremer, for an interview in a London hotel lobby, he broke in after a few minutes to say: “My wife has left me for Barenboim. Do you know anyone for me?”
This was so far outside the normal encounter, where an artist plugs a project and the journalist creates an angle, that I have no further recollection of the interview and probably made a complete hash of it. What endures is an impression of raw honesty and searing pain, twin drivers I came to recognise as the keys to Kremer’s