Wartime Music, Vol. 5

Mieczysław Weinberg is oftenest mentioned in connection with his great friend Dmitri Shostakovich. For some Weinberg was little more than his imitator; for others a figure unduly overlooked owing to his proximity to the great man. I'm in no position to contest the apparent consensus that Shostakovich was the better composer of the two, but at least a few of Weinberg's works are wonderful, memorable pieces that, for me, outshine the equivalent works by his more famous contemporary.

These include his Piano Quintet and his Cello Concerto, the latter among the two works featured on the present CD. The Cello Concerto was composed in the late '40s but not given a performance until 1957, with the great Mstislav Rostropovich as the soloist. It's a deeply emotive work, and one which very prominently features Jewish themes and influences: the anti-semitic climate of Stalin's last years at least partly accounting for the tardiness of its public debut.

The other work on the CD is Weinberg's Symphony No. 1, which isn't a piece I know well, as it's nearly always the Concerto I want to hear when I put it on. It was written in 1942 and dedicated to the Red Army, with whose help he had fled the invasion of his native Poland.

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All Wrapped Up

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