Weinberg: String Quartets, Vol. 6

Album review

The music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who fled the Nazis and endured persecution from Stalin (although, as annotator David Fanning points out here, he regarded the Red Army as his savior), has increased sharply in popularity. Weinberg is part of Shostakovich's stylistic universe and, although the relationship was never a formal one, said that he regarded himself as Shostakovich's pupil. Yet he was no clone. Jewish motifs play a role in some of his music, and in the string quartets here, especially the String Quartet No. 12, Op. 103, Bartók is as important a model as Shostakovich. Hear the Presto movement of that symphony (track 7), with its motivic cells closely packed around a central note, interspersed with hammered repetitions of a single tone. It's an extraordinary piece, and the multinational Quatuor Danel brings the requisite taut intensity. The other two works are lighter in tone, with the String Quartet No. 17, Op. 146 (composed in 1986), diverging quite a bit from the hopeless jocularity of many of Shostakovich's late pieces. It matches up quite well to the String Quartet No. 2, Op. 3, written in the early months of World War II but seemingly oblivious to the chaos that had erupted all around the composer (by the time he wrote it, he had fled his native Warsaw for Minsk). Weinberg himself seems to have recognized the connection, for he revised the quartet heavily near the end of his life. It begins in an almost neo-classic manner before becoming submerged in contrapuntal complications. Different as they are in mood, all three works are immediately recognizable as the work of the same creative figure, making this a reasonable first pick for those interested in Weinberg's music. Another major plus is the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German Radio) engineering for the CPO label, accomplished at the Stolbergstrasse Studio in Cologne, and capturing the physicality of the string quartet without overdoing the non-musical sounds in the least. An excellent conclusion to the Quatuor Danel's Weinberg cycle.

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