courtesy of Crossover Media
This coming Friday Deutsche Grammophon (DG) will continue Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s undertaking to record the symphonies of Mieczysław Weinberg. Her debut recording with DG coupled his Opus 30 (second) symphony (completed in 1946) with his Opus 152 (the 21st, given the title “Kaddish,” completed in 1991). The new release will begin with Opus 81, the seventh symphony scored for string orchestra and harpsichord, completed in 1964, and conclude with Opus 45, the third symphony scored for large orchestra in its 1959 revised version. The harpsichordist for Opus 81 in Kirill Gerstein. Between these two symphonies is a recording of the Opus 75 (first) concerto for flute and orchestra, completed in 1961, with Marie-Christine Zupancic as soloist. As many will expect, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-orders.
Two orchestras were involved in the recording of this new album. Opus 81, which requires chamber resources, was recorded with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. The remainder of the album was recorded with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), the ensemble that visited Davies Symphony Hall this past Sunday with Gražinytė-Tyla on the podium. However, she has resigned as CBSO Music Director and will serve as Principal Guest Conductor for the coming season. She will make her debut with the Munich Philharmonic in December.
Some readers may recall that I found the experience of Gražinytė-Tyla’s visit to Davies to be an uneven one. While I was impressed by the sensitivity of her interpretations of music by Benjamin Britten (the instrumental “sea interludes” from his Opus 33 Peter Grimes opera) and Edward Elgar (his Opus 85 cello concerto with Sheku Kanneh-Mason as soloists), I felt that she was unduly detached from the symphony Thomas Adès had composed based on music from his The Exterminating Angel opera and, more significantly, from her account of Claude Debussy’s “La Mer.”
No such feelings of detachment were conveyed in the three Weinberg selections on her new album. I was particularly interested in Opus 81, particularly since I know Gerstein best as a “powerhouse pianist.” His many talents include an ability to provide accounts of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff that are not just credible but downright stimulating. Nevertheless, he seems to have understood fully both the why and the how behind Weinberg’s decision to employ the harpsichord as a concertante instrument; and his chemistry with both the Kammerphilharmonie and Gražinytė-Tyla could not have been better. Weinberg was clearly exploring new sonorities with this symphony, and Gražinytė-Tyla’s account clearly presents those explorations to the attentive listener.
As might be guessed, the larger resources for both the Opus 45 symphony and the Opus 75 concerto entail a major rhetorical shift. The content of her debut album clearly prepared her to make such shifts and present them in an engaging manner. I have to confess that, while I have put a lot of my writing time into the Weinberg canon, prior to this new DG album, all of my experiences have been either on the level of chamber resources or operatic (having seen the video of David Pountney’s staging of The Passenger). Now I know that I have been missing out on Weinberg’s approaches to orchestral ensembles, some of which emerge as reflections of the work of his colleague Dmitri Shostakovich while others are distinctively unique.
No comments:
Post a Comment