Weinberg Symphony 17

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.

The East-West Chamber Orchestra is the resident orchestra of the Yuri Bashmet International Music Festival and is made up of concertmasters from leading orchestras and competition laureates. On this, their debut recording, they celebrate the centenary of Mieczysław Weinberg’s birth. Weinberg’s Chamber Symphonies reflect his creativity and the dramatic times in which he lived—the formal lucidity and directness of the First and the elegiac Third—both derived from string quartets composed in the shadow of the Second World War.

This double album, recorded in Vienna and in Riga in June 2015, includes all four of the chamber symphonies written in the last decade of Polish-born Soviet composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s life, plus a beautiful new arrangement – by Gidon Kremer and Kremerata percussionist Andrey Pushkarev – of the early Piano Quintet of 1944, heard here in a premiere recording. It is a recording which underlines the importance and originality of Weinberg’s music. For Gidon Kremer, “Weinberg has become a source of unlimited inspiration. No other composer has entered my own and Kremerata Baltica’s repertoire and program concepts with such intensity.” Weinberg’s chamber symphonies are Kremer says, “the most personal reflections of a great composer on his own life and his generation, like a diary of the most dramatic period of the 20th century.”

Few composers can be said to be ‘citizens of nowhere’ and yet, exactly this moniker is appropriate for Mieczysław Weinberg. He was born and raised in Poland to a Jewish family, but for complex reasons spent the majority of his life in Soviet Russia. He had a prolific output(over 150 opus-numbered works, and more besides), but never reached international fame during his lifetime. Since his death in 1996, that has all changed. His powerful music speaks to generations, made all the more powerful by his emotive biography. Weinberg was born in December 1919; his father was a violinist and conductor for several Jewish theatres in Warsaw, and his mother was an actor and singer. After beginning piano, Weinberg showed great talent and began joining his father in the orchestra pit from the age of 11. He studied at the Warsaw conservatoire, and was even offered a scholarship to study in America.