Polish-Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, also known as Moises
Vainberg, has received a flurry of attention in the new century for
works that showed the influence of both Shostakovich and Prokofiev but
aped neither one, developing a distinctive style rooted in the
increasingly important music of the Soviet Union in the middle 20th
century. Weinberg fled the Nazi invasion in Poland, only to find
mistrust from both the Soviet government and dissidents who considered
him insufficiently confrontational. Like Shostakovich he was a pianist.
His piano music dates mostly from the first phases of his output (a bout
with tuberculosis sidelined his concert career), and four of the five
works here were composed while he was still in Poland or in Minsk, where
he resumed his studies after fleeing and saw his relatives die in
concentration camps. They are not the best samples of Weinberg's mature
style, but all are worthwhile. The Two Mazurkas, Op. 10, and Lullaby,
Op. 1, were Weinberg's earliest works, written during his teenage years,
with all kinds of unexpected youthful complications arising from simple
tonal material. The Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 8, is a pure essay in
Prokofiev's style; it was premiered by Emil Gilels. A bit more
interesting is the slightly earlier Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 5, with
tough dissonances kept in check by contrapuntal passages. The mood,
although not the specific language, recalls early Shostakovich. The
final Piano Sonata, Op. 49bis, will also be of interest to Soviet music
buffs. It had its origins in a work written during the repression of
Stalin's culture czar Andrei Zhdanov, when composers retreated to a safe
simplicity. But Weinberg returned to the work in the 1970s and expanded
it, with intriguing results: it has the flavor of a reflection on those
difficult days. American pianist Allison Brewster Franzetti has a basic
feel for Russian music and a muscular style that projects these
explosive youthful works well. This is the first in a projected series
of Weinberg works from this performer, and it bodes well for the set. by James Manheim
19.3.22
MIECZYSLAW WEINBERG : Complete Piano Works • 1 (Allison Brewster Franzetti) (2012) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless
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
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