Auerbach Weinberg Dvorak Trio Zimbalist

Following a successful recording of Dvorák's Violin Concerto with French violinist Isabelle Faust accompanied by Jirí Belohlávek leading the Prague Philharmonia, Harmonia Mundi has returned from the Czech Republic with a recording of French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras accompanied by Belohlávek and the Prague Philharmonia in Dvorák's Cello Concerto. The results this time are even better than before. As Queyras showed in the previous disc's performance of Dvorák's F minor Trio, he is a passionately expressive, technically faultless, and ever-so-slightly reserved player and his performance here of the Cello Concerto is all those things and more.

The music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg is finally beginning to get the hearing it has long deserved. Weinberg’s lifetime spanned the 20th century: born 1919 in Warsaw, he died 1996 in Moscow, in semi-obscurity. Along the way, his allies and supporters had included Dmitri Shostakovich, who considered him one of the great composers of the age. This double album with the Kremerata Baltica, recorded in Neuhardenberg and Lockenhaus, makes a good case for that claim. Effectively a portrait album, it begins with Weinberg’s extraordinary Violin Sonata No. 3, brilliantly performed by Gidon Kremer, and proceeds from chamber music works (the Sonatina op. 46, the Trio op. 48) to strikingly-contrasting compositions for string orchestra.

The third album from Trio Image follows the success of their releases of the Piano Trio by Mauricio Kagel and Chamber music by Hans Sommer. The new album consists partly of world premiere recordings of unknown repertoire.

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.

Dvořák’s chamber music is amongst the most extensive and significant of the 19th-century and the four surviving piano trios embody his command of the form. The first two were written in rapid succession, with No. 1 in B flat major marrying Schubertian lyricism with Slavic inflexions, serenity with joy. No. 2 in G minor is rather more classically conceived though it shares the same formal structure as No. 1 and exudes a similar quotient of lyric beauty.