MIECZYSLAW WEINBERG : Complete Piano Works • 2 (Allison Brewster Franzetti) (2012) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

The music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who managed to survive persecution from both the Nazis and the Stalinists, has gained new attention with the continuing expansion of popularity of his mentor and sometime protector, Shostakovich. The structure of the ongoing series of his complete piano works by American pianist Allison Brewster Franzetti remains to be seen, but she does well with this grouping of works from around 1950: this was the period in which both Weinberg and Shostakovich suffered from Stalinist cultural repression and adjusted their styles in a conservative direction accordingly. (Weinberg was actually jailed and, despite Shostakovich's help, not released until after Stalin's death.) The three works here are clearly related to Shostakovich's piano works of his mid-career, but are entirely different in effect. The characteristic mordant quality in Shostakovich is missing, replaced by a sense of the Romantic legacy (explicit in a piece like the Etude, track 9, from the Partita, Op. 54) combined with an uncertain, dark quest into the future. Annotator David Fanning makes much of the contrast between "subdued and intimate" and "dramatic and virtuosic" in that Partita, but in fact all three works on the album are similarly structured. Weinberg begins almost diffidently, with conventional tonal material that seems to slip periodically into a dark, intense reverie. It's a powerful response to the situation Weinberg faced during this period, and Franzetti gives the music its deserved overall intensity. The slow movements of the Piano Sonatina, Op. 49, with its shifting bass ostinato, and the Piano Sonata No. 4 in B minor, Op. 56, with its genuinely tragic mood, are especially noteworthy, and the Partita would make an ideal program companion to Shostakovich's preludes and fugues. Recommended for collections of Russian music in the 20th century. by James Manheim