The popular BBC Radio 3 programme 'Composer of the week', presented by Donald Macleod, will be focusing entirely on Weinberg next week (starting 02/06/14). Weinberg was chosen by an open listener poll, with audiences invited to suggest their favourite 'obscure' composer. Apparently, Weinberg's name came out on top, leading to the week's broadcasts title of 'The greatest composer you've (probably) never heard of'. This will see five hour-length episodes, dedicated to Weinberg's life and works, featuring the broadcaster and Weinberg-enthusiast, Martin Anderson. More from the BBC's website:
'Over the past seven decades, Composer of the Week has delved into just
about every major composer in classical music, and plenty of less
well-known ones too. As the programme reached its 70th birthday last
year, Donald Macleod challenged listeners to come up with the name of a
deserving composer who had never previously been featured. Suggestions
flooded in, over four-and-a-half-thousand of them, and of these, more
than 20 made the case for an obscure Soviet composer of Polish-Jewish
origin, Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Weinberg's music is well represented on CD,
and as Donald heard more and more of it, his astonishment that he
hadn't come across it before grew commensurately. So all this week,
Donald Macleod explores the life and work of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, in the
company of writer, broadcaster and champion of unjustly neglected
composers, Martin Anderson.'
Find a link to the first page on the BBC website here. All five episodes of the series will be available to listen again on the BBC iPlayer website.
An interview has been published online, with Gavin Dixon talking to acclaimed Russian composer Alexander Raskatov (who, as you may know, was a close friend to Weinberg in his later years). Over the course of their conversation, they discuss Raskatov's recent works programmed at the Drogheda Festival. Of particular interest to readers of this blog, they begin to discuss Raskatov's work Monk's Music, which is dedicated to Weinberg. Raskatov recalls his close friendship with Weinberg, and then begins a poignant recollection of Weinberg's final years.
(From the website www.seenandheard-international.com, link below).
[Raskatov:] We were friends. When I was young, from
around 1980, I often visited Weinberg. He invited me. He played me his
music, I played him mine. We talked a lot. It was a fantastic time, and I
thought it would never end. He played an important role because he
always supported my music in all the Moscow institutions, the Union of
Composers, the Ministry of Culture and so on. He was old school, full of
old traditions. He had played four hands with Shostakovich, and he told
me many things about his friendship with Shostakovich. But he was an
extremely modest man. I came to him with my early Viola Concerto, which I
had dedicated to him – I’d written the dedication in very grand,
self-important language; I was young. I played it for him and he was
very touched. He said: ‘you know Sasha this is the third composition
which is dedicated to me’ I asked what the first two were, he said: ‘the
Tenth Quartet of Dmitri Dmitriyevich [Shostakovich] and then the Cello
Sonata of Boris Tchaikovsky; and now you are the third one.’ Anyway,
during the 80s we met dozens of times. I helped him to organise the
recording of his opera Portrait. We always had a lot of things to discuss.
[GD:] Listening to Raskatov talk about Weinberg’s final years, it’s clear his neglect was keenly felt.
[Raskatov:] When I left Russia, my departure was
probably provoked by his illness. In 1993 I came to his house. He was
very, very ill – he was dying really in poverty. He wasn’t able to buy
important medicines for his treatment. It all cost money, and our Union
of Composers, our government was unable to help him. I spoke to Elena
Vassilieva about this composer who was so ill, and she sent some money.
She told me to just give it, from one French singer to a composer, it
might help a little bit. And I came to him and I told him I had some
money for him. And he asked: ‘Sasha, is it your money?’ I said: ‘No, it
is not mine, just take it.’ And he cried. When I saw this I thought, if
this composer, who wrote so many symphonies, quartets, and operas, is in
such a helpless situation, and the country cannot do anything for him,
what can there be here for us younger composers? So it was something
very painful that I felt. He never knew it, but that was a turning point
for me. It showed me the real situation of music in the 1990s. I left
and soon after he died. I received a letter from his wife. I regret very
much that I left without saying adieu. And I felt that I was obliged to
somehow commemorate his existence, to dedicate something to him. And as
he was a great master of string quartets I decided this genre would be
the best for his memory.
Naxos: 2014, Vladimir Lande (Conductor), Andrew Balio (Trumpet), St. Petersburg Chamber Choir, and St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra. Liner notes - Richard Whitehouse.
Naxos continue their admirable effort in releasing Weinberg's symphonies, with the Eighteenth, Op. 138, the second of the trilogy 'On the Threshold of War'. Also included is the ever-popular Trumpet Concerto, Op. 94, with Andrew Balio as soloist. Considering that the same ensemble's previous release of Weinberg's Twelfth Symphony was less than a success (see my review here), this latest CD goes some way to win back their reputation as interpreters of Weinberg's symphonic works.
Trumpet Concerto, Op. 94
I. Etudes
II. Episodes
III. Fanfares
Weinberg's trumpet concerto was dedicated to Soviet trumpeter Timofei Dokshitser, who premiered the work with Kirill Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in 1968. It's sense of playfulness and energy have both contributed to its enduring appeal to soloists and audiences alike (indeed, it has become a staple of Russian trumpet exams). With several commercial recordings available, this new reading provides a fresh contribution, with Andrew Balio giving an admirable performance in the cheeky solo part.
The opening scalic passages of the 'Etudes' movement almost sound like defying raspberries blown in the face of the orchestra, establishing the central dialogue of the concerto - the joke-like trumpet soloist versus the more austere voice of the orchestra (a dialogue perhaps familiar from Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto). The final movement of the concerto is particularly memorable, with its quotations from Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky, providing a collage of notable Trumpet passages. The unity of the work inspired Shostakovich to dub the Trumpet Concerto, with only a hint of over-exaggeration, 'a Symphony for trumpet and orchestra'.
The recording here is warm, with a generally good balance. Any untidyness to be found in the strings is immediately offset by the charisma of Balio as soloist, if anything only emphasising the 'cheeky' side to the trumpet part.
Symphony No. 18, Op. 138, 'War - there is no word more cruel'
I. Adagio - Allegro
II. 'He was buried in the Earth'
III. 'My dear little berry, you do not know the pain that is in my heart'
IV. 'War - there is no word more cruel'
Weinberg's symphonic trilogy 'On the Threshold of War' was one of the great achievements of his later career, though its presence on the concert platform has been notably absent since its premiere performances. With the efforts of the Neos label and now Naxos, the whole trilogy is widely available, and a remarkable work it proves to be.
Lande and the St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra have released Weinberg's Nineteenth Symphony, the concluding part of the trilogy. My review of that purely orchestral work can be found here. In this excellent reading, Lande proves that the Eighteenth is really the key central section of this great work. Any of the unstability present in their previous reading of the Twelfth symphony is thankfully absent.
The warm opening of the first movement sets the tone - remarkably warm and moving, becoming all the more powerful with the brass entry. This opening movement acts as an overture to the work, with the really moving passages present in the choral work, with the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir giving an excellent performance - try the opening of the second movement, 'He was buried in the Earth' and see what I mean. The third movement is the most moving for me, 'My dear little berry', sung by female voices. The final movement gives a solemn epilogue, to words by Aleksandr Tvardovsky:
War - there is no word more cruel.
War - there is no word more sad.
War - there is no word more holy.
In the sorrow and the glory of these years.
There is and there could not be
Any other word on our lips.
This recording gives an excellent reading of Weinberg's ultimately optimistic message - that the pains of war do nothing to extinguish the beauty of human spirit. An excellent addition here (compared to the Naxos recording of Weinberg's Eighth Symphony) is the inclusion of translations for the sung texts. Combined with Mr. Whitehouse's liner notes, a good background is given to fully understand the work. In my opinion, the quality of this release balances out any quibbles to be found in their previous Weinberg disc. Heartily recommended, principally for the programming of Weinberg's Eighteenth.
Recommended other listening:
There are several excellent recordings of the Trumpet Concerto widely available, so I will only link to one available to listen to on youtube:
This is the Neos label release, to be found to buy on Amazon - link.
For another recording of the Eighteenth Symphony, there is the Olympia recording with the forces that premiered the work, the USSR Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Vladimir Fedoseyev conducting (though this CD is now something of a collector's item).
Otherwise, the following two releases complete the symphonic trilogy and are available for purchase:
Neos - Weinberg Symphony No. 17, Weiner Symphoniker, Vladimir Fedoseyev - Link
Naxos (Lande & St. Petersburg State Orchestra) - Symphony No. 19 - Link
The recent programming on a Challenge records disc combined Weinberg's Violin Concerto alongside that of Benjamin Britten. As well as being an excellent album (see my review here), the combination of Weinberg and Britten proved a well-suited duo. There are numerous reasons for this, the most obvious also being the most simple: Britten's influence can often be heard in Weinberg's music, particularly in his Operas.
Britten and Shostakovich, 1966.
The close friendship between Britten and Shostakovich is well known. Britten was one of the few people to stand up for Shostakovich's opera 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' after its British premiere in 1936. Shostakovich was so impressed with Britten's War Reqiuem that he held it up as an example to his composition students. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the two composers visited each other. Britten and Peter Pears stayed with Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya for New Year's, 1966. Over the course of their stay, they often saw Shostakovich and his wife Irina. Peter Pears wrote of the visit in his diary:
25th December, 1966
Christmas dinner at Slava's [i.e. - Rostropovich's]... Dmitri and Irena Shostakovich were there, punctual as always... Shostakovich in good form, talkative, nervous, Irena gentle, quiet, a marvellous foil for him.
1st January, 1967
We were summoned for 10:00 pm at Dmitri's...We had a quick nip of vodka and...next came a meal around a long table groaning with drink and eats, and presents...a score of Dmitri's Stepan Razin for Ben, and a record of the same for me.
The Shostakovich's visited Britten at home in Aldeburgh in 1972, Shostakovich particularly excited to see the sketches for Death in Venice. Shostakovich wrote that had it not been for the language barrier that existed between himself and Britten, the two could have become close friends.
The musical parallels are close, with both composers adapting twelve-note rows into their music at around the same time, and each generously quoting the other's music. Notably - see Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony for the strong influence from Britten. With such a strong bond between the two composers, it was natural for Weinberg to be strongly familiar with Britten's music.
Admittedly, there isn't a scrap of recorded evidence to link the two. But it is certainly tempting to suggest that Weinberg would have met Britten during his stays in Moscow. We can certainly say that Weinberg and Shostakovich discussed Britten's music at length, and Weinberg's familiarity with Britten's work is evinced by his collection of scores and records. Shostakovich and Weinberg conversed about music on an almost daily basis. It is certainly tantalising to suggest that Shostakovich could have mentioned Weinberg's name to Britten.
Weinberg'sRequiem, Op. 96, owes a large amount to Britten's War Reqiuem, a work that Shostakovich loved (according to Yevtushenko, author of 'Babi Yar', a poem that Shostakovich used in his Thirteenth Symphony, Shostakovich listened to Britten's War Reqiuem on repeat, crying all the way through).
An immediately noticeable similarity between the two works is the use of boy's voices to depict innocence. In Britten's case, the boy's choir sing texts by war poet Wilfred Owen interspersed between the text of the requiem mass. Weinberg's Requiem uses a selection of poetry from authors including Garcia Lorca and Mikhael Dudkin, in a multi-national array that also echoes Britten's War Requiem. They differ in their complexity, however, as Weinberg's work is beyond the grasp of amateur ensembles. Partly as a result of this, Weinberg's Requiem was not performed until 2009, in Liverpool. Meanwhile, Britten's War Reqiuem was famously commissioned for the reopening of Coventry Cathedral, and was premiered to international acclaim in 1962, four years before Weinberg began writing his work.
It is in Weinberg's operas that the Britten influence becomes more telling. David Nice has rightly pointed out that 'by the late 1960s, when Weinberg completed The Passenger, one great composer of Russian operas, Sergei Prokofiev, was long dead, and the other, Shostakovich, had produced nothing completely new for the operatic stage in decades'. As such, Britten was the obvious leader in opera on the world stage at that time.
Weinberg waited until relatively late in his career before turning to opera. His first opera, The Passenger, is arguably is masterpiece (and you can read more about it in my article here), set in Auschwitz, in a triumph of humanist drama. Throughout, there are noticeable Britten-like passages, often built around chains of thirds. For instance, there is the following passage in The Passenger:
Strikingly reminiscent of the first sea interlude in Britten's Peter Grimes:
The similarities continue throughout Weinberg's other operas. For instance, there is Weinberg's use of folk songs and musical quotation, effortlessly woven into the music to emphasise aspects of the drama - a technique used extensively in Britten's operas. Perhaps the most notable of these is the Lamplighter's song in The Portrait - replete with characteristic Weinbergian fourths. The frequent use of Celesta in The Passenger also recalls Peter Grimes, and Weinberg's more extended use of percussion in The Passenger even anticipates Britten's Death in Venice.
To conclude, Britten's influence is easy to identify in Weinberg's music, as well as on a more abstract level, as they both shared similar humanistic ideals - in Britten's case, extending to his decision to be a conscientious objector during WWII. The question of how Weinberg came to know Britten's works is easily addressed when Britten's friendship with Shostakovich is taken into account, and the prescence of Britten's style in Weinberg's operas seems glaringly obvious if we consider that he was a world-leader on the operatic stage at that time (though, importantly, Weinberg would not have heard a Britten opera in concert in the Soviet Union during this time; his knowledge came through scores and recordings). Weinberg's debt to Britten is a fascinating trait - I intend to further this introductory article with a more thorough examination of Weinberg's operas, including The Portrait and The Idiot.
Challenge Classics CC72627, Violin Concertos by Benjamin Britten and Mieczysław Weinberg, Linus Roth (soloist), with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, conducted by Mihkel Kütson. Liner notes by Jens F. Laurson.
Another admirable release by the violinist Linus Roth, building on the foundation laid by his previous 3-disc album with the pianist José Gallardo - see my review here. Roth's playing is faultless throughout, and the detractingly cold sound from the previous recording is absent here, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin providing a lush cushion for Roth's soloistic antics. The release also has the selling point of being a SACD disc, should you have suitable equipment to enjoy it (which I don't; being a humble student, such tech is well out of my price range).
The disc features the excellent programming of combining Britten and Weinberg; while the close connections between Britten and Shostakovich have often been noted, the influence on Weinberg is an underexplored topic itself. Keep your eyes posted over the next few weeks, I have a blog-post/article in the works on this very topic.
Britten
I must profess that the Britten violin concerto, Op. 15, is not a work that I am familiar with. Indeed, aside from his stage works and music for choir, I am admittedly scant on recordings of Britten. I am an avid fan of his Piano Concerto, however, and it is with reference to this work that I plunged headlong into this recording. Reading from Jens F. Laurson's excellent liner notes, I see that it is a relatively early work, one of the first written after Britten had arrived in the US, 1939.
The music owes a great deal to the violin concerto by Berg, with several passages sounding strikingly similar. Overall, however, it is a charming work of great drama, with both tender and assertive moments. The opening Moderato con moto movement gives a tender opening, ripe with material for development. The vivace middle movement is my personal favourite, with a sweeping orchestral line recurring throughout. The finalpassacaglia movement is strongly reminiscent of Shostakovich, and serves as perhaps the strongest link to Weinberg's own musical language.
The solo part for the Britten, while virtuosic, also demands a great sense of leading a drama. Roth fills the position of orator admirably, with little doubt as to his coolness in the role. Balance across the orchestra is excellent, giving a well-polished sound, particularly emphasised in the 'punching' gestures to be heard in the middle movement. The recording throughout is nuanced and warm, paying attention to the delicacies of Britten's orchestration, as well as the ferocity of his punctuating motifs throughout. If anything, this encourages me to seek out Britten's other concerto works.
Weinberg
Next I turn to a work that I am much more familiar with, Weinberg's Violin Concerto, Op. 67. Written in 1959 and dedicated to Leonid Kogan, it is a world apart from his Violin Concertino, which readers may be familiar with, owing to the spate of recordings released recently. If the concertino can be said to represent a cheerful attitude in the face of adversity, then the 1959 work is a serious soloistic piece, rich with drama. It was premiered by Kogan in 1961, with Kondrashin conducting. A star in his own right, Kogan had a reputation for his strongly pro-Soviet leanings - though this may be a result of his international success, which he whole-heartedly attributed to the support of the Soviet government (similar to Weinberg's own enthusiasm). The concerto is marked by its near-relentless solo part, which barely rests for more than a moment, particularly in the first movement. In its four-movement structure, the work harks back to the classical Concerto, a parallel reinforced by Weinberg's inclusion of a Mozart quote in the Adagio third movement (a theme taken from the 'little' G minor Symphony). My previous experience of this work stems from Kondrashin and Kogan's formidable recording, made soon after the premiere performance. After then, recordings have been few and far between (but include a Naxos-label CD featuring Ilya Grubert on violin). With an interpretation as strong as Roth and Kütson's here, it is my hope that this CD will act as a case for other soloists to take up this work.
Shostakovich wrote to his friend Isaak Glikman in 1960, mentioning Weinberg's Violin Concerto:
I am very impressed by M.S. Vainberg’s Violin Concerto... It is a magnificent
work. And I am weighing my words.
Of course, Shostakovich's own violin concertos are apt for comparison with Weinberg's own, particularly Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto, written 1947-48.
The first movement opens with a strident gesture, quickly answered by the soloist. This immediately establishes the soloist-ensemble dialogue over the course of the work - that the Violin solo really does lead the music, in a brawling drama that is fully sustained over the course of the whole Concerto. Roth's handling of the virtuosic part is excellent throughout, never rising above a controlled restrain through the most fiendish passages, while also extremely tender in the Adagio movement.
Overall, I cannot fault this recording, particularly the lush sound engineering. I can only hope that this disc can serve as a persuasive case to encourage other violinists to take up both of these works - but especially the Weinberg.
LINKS TO BUY:
The Challenge Records website - here (also featuring more information about the disc)
Amazon.co.uk - link.
Recommended comparative listening
Naxos, Miaskovsky and Vainberg, Violin Concertos, Russian Philharmonic Orchestra, Dmitri Yablovsky cond., Ilya Grubert (Violin). Link here.
Melodiya - Vainberg, Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 4, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Kiril Kondrashin cond., Leonid Kogan (Violin).
- A really splendid recording, still setting the bar to which all others must live up to. The actual disc is rather tricky to find, though the recording has helpfully been uploaded onto youtube:
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And for those eager for more media from Mr. Roth, see this excellent youtube video, discussing the album:
P.S. - keep posted for my upcoming feature on Britten and Weinberg. D.E.
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