Mists of time lift on Soviet musical hero
MIECZYSLAW Weinberg had the bad fortune to live under two totalitarian regimes and only now are we discovering his finest music.
Wentworth Courier
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MIECZYSLAW Weinberg had the bad fortune to live under two totalitarian regimes and only now are we discovering his finest music.
As a Polish Jew in Warsaw he was forced to flee the Nazi invasion to Stalin’s Soviet Union. His parents and sisters were left behind and perished in a concentration camp.
In Russia he was befriended by his hero, Dmitri Shostakovich, whose influence on his music is evident throughout this fine double album set on the ECM label featuring Latvian violin maestro Gidon Kremer and his excellent orchestra Kremerata Baltica.
The unpredictable Stalinist regime largely favoured Weinberg and he was considered the third most important Soviet composer after Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
BURIED
However he did run foul of the dictator when his father-in-law was implicated in a political plot, prompting Shostakovich to write to the infamous police chief Lavrenti Beria calling on him to intercede. As it happened Stalin’s death saved the situation.
Weinberg’s music got buried in the post-Stalinist era and it’s only now coming to light thanks to some excellent recordings. And there’s plenty of material to work with, including 26 symphonies, 17 string quartets and seven operas.
He also wrote chamber symphonies and this superbly produced and performed double-disc set features four of them, all written towards the end of his life — he died in 1996, five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union — alongside his most popular chamber work, the piano quintet Op 18, arranged here for piano and string orchestra with percussion.
SPACIOUS
This is the most individual work of the collection. You can hear the influence of Shostakovich but Weinberg frequently heads off down his own original path. All in all it’s a fascinating and enjoyable major work.
Weinberg’s music is tonal, quite often bleak and spacious — parts of Chamber Symphony No. 3 which opens the first disc remind this listener of the beautiful long divided melodies of the largo from Shostakovich’s fifth symphony. But it is all very approachable with some charming humorous touches and the two friends shared an enthusiasm for folk melodies and Jewish themes.
This is most apparent in the 4th chamber symphony, one of his last works, which features that most Jewish of instruments, the clarinet, here wielded with enormous brio by Mate Bekavac, set against some Bartokian string playing.
I think we can expect to hear far more of Weinberg on the prestige classical music labels.
Kremer and his band are in top form here and they get sterling support from pianist Yulianna Avdeeva and percussionist Andrei Pushkarev in the quintet.
You’ll find it at Sanity Music for $59.99.