courtesy of Naxos of America
I have violinist Gidon Kremer to thank for my interest in the Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg. Weinberg graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory in 1939, just in time to escape the coming of the Nazis by moving to the Soviet Union, where he spent the rest of this life. Not long after his arrival in Minsk, he got to meet Dmitri Shostakovich. The two quickly became close friends and stayed that way for the rest of Shostakovich’s life, and it was at Shostakovich’s advice that Weinberg moved to Moscow.
Like Shostakovich, Weinberg had an on-again-off-again relationship with Soviet authorities. In 1948 his father-in-law was assassinated in Minsk on direct orders from Joseph Stalin, and Weinberg himself was arrested in February of 1953. In spite of Shostakovich’s efforts to intervene, Weinberg could easily have been sentenced to death had it not been for the abrupt shifts in policy that followed Stalin’s death. Instead, Weinberg lived to a ripe old age of 76, dying on February 26, 1996 (and thus outliving the Soviet Union).
Also like Shostakovich, Weinberg’s exposure as a composer was benefitted by the interest of the star cellist of the Soviet Union, Mstislav Rostropovich. Rostropovich gave the world premiere performance of Weinberg’s Opus 43 cello concerto in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on February 25, 1964. In 1969 Weinberg completed his Opus 100, a set of 24 solo cello preludes written for Rostropovich. The number may have come from Shostakovich’s Opus 34 piano preludes, which followed the traversal of all of the major and minor keys found in the ordering of the Opus 28 piano preludes of Frédéric Chopin; but Weinberg did not assign key signatures to any of his own preludes. On the other hand, he did incorporate playful references to at least two cellos concertos in Rostropovich’s repertoire, Robert Schumann’s Opus 129 in A minor and Shostakovich’s Opus 107 in E-flat major (the first of two that Shostakovich dedicated to Rostropovich). Sadly, Rostropovich never played Weinberg’s preludes.
Kremer, on the other hand, has been a significant champion of Weinberg’s music. Since his first recording sessions for ECM New Series with his Kremerata Baltica in 2012, he has prepared music for two two-CD ECM albums, covering, among other selections, all four of Weinberg’s chamber symphonies. It is therefore not surprising that he chose to adapt Weinberg’s Opus 100 preludes for solo violin performances, and this past Friday Accentus Music released a recording of Kremer playing all 24 of those adaptations.
To be fair, Kremer has had a major impact on my own interest in listening to Weinberg’s music, not only through his recordings but also through a visit that Kremerata Baltica made to Davies Symphony Hall in my home town of San Francisco on February 2, 2014. As a result I tend to be positively disposed to any effort by Kremer to expand my awareness of the (impressively large) Weinberg catalog. Admittedly, it is a little bit weird to listen to a violin working its way around phrases of cello music by Schumann and Shostakovich; but there is very little about either of those themes that is firmly locked into cello sonorities. The overall effect is more one of Kremer relating anecdotes about that music that he happened to have acquired from Weinberg.
What is most important is the brevity of all of the preludes. (None of them are as long as five minutes.) As a result, the duration of the entire album is less than 50 minutes. Most would probably find that a bit skimpy for a single CD. Nevertheless, there is more than enough content to keep the attentive listener fully absorbed over the course of the entire cycle. Besides, one gets to benefit from not only Weinberg’s rich imagination but also the full breadth of Kremer’s skills as both arranger and performer!
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