Weinberg First

The music of Mieczys?aw Weinberg continues to be issued, and continues to impress. Like his British counterpart, York Bowen, Weinberg was a composer trapped in time and place, and it is good that their very different musics are now coming to the fore with such regularity. One of the wonderful things about this disc, aside from the committed, intense playing of the instrumentalists, is the sound: crisp and clear, with only a very little reverb, which brings the sound of the instruments into sharp focus and makes the listener pay attention to the music.

Trio Khnopff writes of this new release: Weinbergs Trio was one of the first big pieces we played together, and it has remained a unanimous favorite. The huge emotional spectrum, the quality and originality of the writing, the instrumental challenge, the composer himself (a young man facing the greatest personal and societal challenges) this all comes together in his Trio to create a work that resonates deeply with us and that has been something of a constant companion. The idea of dedicating our first album to Weinberg, and more precisely to the pivotal time around 1945, felt like a natural one.

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 seventeen string quartets of Weinberg span nearly half a century, from his student days in Warsaw to the end of his career in Moscow, and show his development as a composer more clearly than his work in any other genre. The Second Quartet, composed in 1939 – 40 whilst studying in Minsk, was dedicated to his mother and sister, who he would later learn had not survived the German invasion of Poland. Quartet No. 5, of 1945, was the first in which he added titles to each movement, and reflects the influence of Shostakovich over the young composer. The final quartet in this programme – No. 8 – was written in 1959 and dedicated to the Borodin Quartet. For many years the best-known of Weinberg’s quartets in the west, this single-movement work is divided into three sections with a coda.

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.

For this the second volume in their series of Weinberg’s string quartets, the Arcadia Quartet again presents three quartets from contrasting periods in the stylistic development of the composer. The first quartet of the self-taught teenager, written in 1937, in what Weinberg later described as his ‘neo-impressionist’ style, was heavily revised later in his life, and eventually republished as Op. 141, in 1985. (It is this revised version that has been recorded here, the original version surviving only in manuscript form, in places virtually illegible.) The seventh quartet dates from 1957, after a gap of twenty turbulent years that had witnessed the emigration of Weinberg from Poland to Russia, his introduction to Shostakovich, and his experience of censorship and imprisonment in 1953. In contrast to his earlier quartets, the mood is more intimate and withdrawn, yet defiant. The eleventh quartet was composed between 13 October 1965 and 25 December 1966, at a time when Weinberg was mulling over the composition of his first opera, The Passenger. It is dedicated to his first daughter, Victoria, and was premièred by the Borodin Quartet on 13 April 1967 in the Chamber Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire.