Mieczysław Weinberg (Warsaw, 1919 – Moscow, 1996)
Duration: 21 minutes
Instrumentation: solo violin and string orchestra
Much of Mieczysław Weinberg’s enormous compositional output is still being discovered, 25 years after the composer’s death. The belated stage premiere of his deeply moving 1968 opera The Passenger at the Bregenz Festival (2010) and then at the English National Opera (2011) sparked a major renaissance of Weinberg’s music, more and more of which is now available on CD. The Polish-born composer, who fled the Nazis to Soviet Russia, experienced two totalitarian dictatorships first-hand, yet, according to those who knew him, he never lost his optimism and positive outlook on life, presumably because of his strong spiritual beliefs. (He converted from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity shortly before his death.)
Weinberg, who was also a brilliant pianist, was for many years a close friend (and piano-duo partner) of Dmitri Shostakovich, his senior by twelve years. He used to say that meeting Shostakovich gave him new life as a composer, but the influence seemed to be mutual. (Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 10 of 1964, dedicated to Weinberg, used a theme from one of the latter’s works.) For years, the two were in a friendly competition about who could finish more string quartets: in the end, Weinberg won by two points, completing 17 quartets to his friend’s 15.
The Concertino for Violin and Strings was written during the fateful year 1948. On January 13, Weinberg’s father-in-law, the great Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, was assassinated by Stalin’s secret police. Soon afterwards, the Soviet Communist Party issued a resolution in which, among others, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian were denounced as ‟formalists” and enemies of the people. They didn’t bother to denounce the 29-year-old Weinberg, they just ignored him.
In the sunny, serenade-like Concertino, there is no trace of these tragic events; it is as though the composer had gone out of his way to look calm and equanimous. A charming and lyrical work in the usual three movements, the Concertino shows the young composer in full command of his craft. After the serene opening, the second movement begins with a pensive cadenza for unaccompanied violin, which develops into a beautiful romantic melody. The last movement—a valse triste of sorts—contain the only moment in the piece where the solo violin has a longer rest as the rumbling lower strings begin a fugato in fast-moving sixteenth-notes, out of which the composer fashioned a brilliant coda for the re-entering soloist.
Unproblematic as the Concertino may seem in itself, it was certainly written in the wrong place at the wrong time. It remained unperformed during the composer's lifetime and was not heard until 1999, when a Weinberg festival was organized in Moscow on what would have been the composer's 80th birthday.
- Peter Laki