Gidon Kremer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Sonatas For Violin Solo (ecm Ns)(2022)

The trio on this dics is chamber music performance at its highest level of enjoyment. Listening to the CD, you get an impression of three great friends having a most delightful conversation, elegant and graceful. The recorded sound is first rate. You hear all the details of instruments being played and also the acoustic features of the room in which they performed.

Ives tried repeatedly to find a violinist with whom he could play his sonatas, but all such attempts ended in a fiasco. Ives remarked sarcastically about a rehearsal of the Violin Sonata #1 with a German violinist: "The 'Professor' came in and, after a lot of big talk, started to play the first movement of the First Sonata. He didn't even get through the first page. He was all bothered with the rhythms and the notes, and got mad. He said 'This cannot be played. It is awful. It is not music, it makes no sense.' He couldn't get it even after I'd played it over for him several times. I remember he came out of the little back music room with his hands over his ears, and said, 'When you get awfully indigestible food in your stomach that distresses you, you can get rid of it, but I cannot get those horrible sounds out of my ears.'"

from ECM booklet

It seems that Ives derived a lot of pleasure from composing the four violin sonatas written during his mature period of creativity. In general, he wrote most of the "prose" for the piano and most of the "poetry" for the violin. This was one way of resolving the problems that existed in the interaction between the piano and violin. He composed in a lyrical manner, making full use of the violin's natural properties. It seems he developed an entire concept for the uniting of the two instruments. All sections of all of his sonatas, except those in the third, only give tempo indication.

from BVHaast booklet

This piece, a divertimento for string trio (violin, viola, and cello, was composed in 1788, the same year as the E-flat, G-minor, and Jupiter symphonies and the little C-major piano sonata, four of Mozart's best-known and greatest pieces. This divertimento is relatively little-known, yet it is the equal of those far-better-known pieces. Mozart was at the absolute height of his powers as a composer.

After Weinberg and his wife were able to move to Moscow in 1943 with the help of Shostakovich, he wrote the Piano Trio op.24 in 1945. The present recording is based on a copy of the manuscript from 1945, which contains all of the original ideas about the dynamics, phrasings and peculiarities of the composition. Until shortly before his death in 1996, Weinberg’s works were regularly performed with great enthusiasm by Russian artists and now, they slowly but increasingly are reaching the international concert stage. His Piano Trio, like his other numerous works, shows his immense mastery of all compositional forms, genres and styles - always shaped by events in his own fateful life.

Lovers of rare 20th-century chamber music should find something to enjoy on this new CD from CPO, which includes two early works from the 1940s, the Clarinet Sonata, Op. 28, and 12 Miniatures for Flute and Piano, Op. 29, plus two works from the 1980s, the solo Bassoon Sonata, Op. 133 (1981), and the Trio for Flute, Viola, and Harp, Op. 127 (1980). To my ear, the Trio sounds atonal, but since I'm not a musician I can neither affirm nor refute this. The recorded sound is first-class.

Ted Wilks @ amazon.com

Every five years the Soviet Union celebrated the anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution with large-scale public events, to which the country’s leading artists were expected to contribute. Mieczyslaw Weinberg, like his friend Shostakovich, enjoyed mixed fortunes with his efforts. The symphonic poem Dawn (Zarya), Op. 60, dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, seems to have remained unperformed during his lifetime, despite its ideologically irreproachable content. Its première was finally given in the BBC studios in Manchester, on 15 May 2019, by the BBC Philharmonic under John Storgards.

Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer's 2000 release Eight Seasons is a conceptual masterwork. Kremer, long known for his skillful interpretations of Astor Piazzolla's Argentinean tangos, had the brilliant idea of matching four of the Latin master's tone poems of the seasons in his native Buenos Aires with Antonio Vivaldi's conceptually similar masterpiece "The Four Seasons," alternating seasons between the two works. Besides the conceptual perfection of the idea, the performances are exquisite. Kremer and his conservatory orchestra, the Kremerata Baltica, do a particularly masterful job with the Vivaldi, avoiding the ornate bloat that affects so many recordings of this work. Their performances are brisk and to-the-point, with bright tempos that add a vitality not often found in this rather shopworn old standard. As always, Kremer's solos in the Piazzolla works are absolutely superb, with the dramatic flourishes of the massed string section providing startling counterpoint, especially on the breathtaking "Verano Porteno". Eight Seasons is a truly remarkable work by an underrated performer.