Weinberg: String Quartets, Vol. 1

Resenha do Álbum

The musical reputation of Mieczyslaw Weinberg has been steadily on the rise, with performances of his symphonies and now a new cycle of his string quartets underway at the hands of the Arcadia Quartet. The quartets trace Weinberg's compositional development, especially in the first part of his career from which two of the three quartets here come. The String Quartet No. 2, Op. 3, was composed in Minsk in 1939 and 1940 and is a tuneful work (albeit with a nagging sense of uncertainty typical of its time) that's well suited to the Arcadia's warm sound. By 1945, when he composed the String Quartet No. 5, Op. 27, Weinberg had come into the orbit of Shostakovich. What becomes clearer from many Weinberg releases is that the influence went not only from Shostakovich to Weinberg, but often, the other way around, and the Arcadia Quartet brings this out in their playing with richly melodic, melancholy lines. Their performance of the three-movement String Quartet No. 8 in C major, Op. 66, probably the best known of Weinberg's quartets in the West, is clean and elegant, but it is the Fifth Quartet that's the real news here. Consider its first two movements, with their unsettling juxtaposition of deep sadness and a retreat into classic repose. It's pure Shostakovich, yet Shostakovich wasn't doing this kind of thing much by 1945. The second-movement Humoreske, seemingly a light, serenade-type piece until it begins to grimly harp on its main rhythm, is especially compelling, and it's followed by a furious Scherzo of which the Arcadia takes the full measure. The acoustics of Suffolk's Potton Hall have rarely been put to better use than they are here by engineer Jonathan Cooper, with the subtle polyphonic touches in Weinberg's writing emerging in full color. Listeners may prefer other cycles for individual quartets, but the Arcadia is off to a very strong start, with performances that show deep insight into these particular works.

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