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Mieczysław Weinberg: Chamber Symphonies Nos 3 and 4

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Chandos Records
Released: 2015
Time:
 65:55
Category: Classical
Producer(s): Lennart Dehn
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.music-weinberg.net
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2015
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


Chamber Symphony No. 3, Op. 151 (1990) in B flat major • in B-Dur • en si bémol majeur

[1] I Lento - Meno mosso 10:34
[2] II Allegro molto - 5:14
[3] III Adagio - 7:04
[4] IV Andantino - Meno mosso - Largo 10:04

Chamber Symphony No. 4, Op. 153 (1992) in B major • in H-Dur • en si majeur
in one movement for obbligato clarinet, triangle, and string orchestra
Boris Alexandrowitsch Tschaikowski gewidmet

[5] Lento - Meno mosso - 7:43
[6] Allegro molto - Moderato - Meno mosso - 7:19
[7] Adagio - Meno mosso - 9:44
[8] Andantino - Molto ritenuto - Meno mosso - Doppio più lento (adagissimo) 7:48

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra - Orchestra
Fredrik Burstedt - Orchestra Leader
Thord Svedlund - Conductor

Johnny Jannesson - Clarinet on [5-8]
Fredrik Burstedt - Violin on [5-8]
Niklaas Weltman - Cello on [5-8]

Ralph Couzens - Executive Producer
Lennart Dehn - Recording Producer
Torbjörn Samuelsson - Sound Engineer
Lennart Dehn - Editor
Torbjörn Samuelsson - Mastering
Robert Gilmour - SA-CD Mastering
Sue Shortridge - A & R Administrator
Hugh Whitaker - Photography
Thord Svedlund -  - Photography
Finn S. Gundersen - Booklet Editor
David Fanning - Liner Notes

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2015 CD Chandos Records SACD CHSA5146

Photographs of Mieczysław Weinberg kindly provided by Tommy Persson.

Recording venue Konserthuset, Helsingborg, Sweden; 4-7 March 2014



Weinberg: Chamber Symphonies Nos 3 and 4

Late works

The last decade of Mieczysław Weinberg (1919 – 1996), spent in late-Soviet and post-Soviet Moscow, was marked by a progressive withdrawal from public life. This was brought about by infirmity, loss of friends to death and emigration, and a gradual decline in public and professional interest in his work. But it would be wrong to describe his situation as out-and-out neglect. At least until the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, his major new works were still performed. Published interviews and a State Prize testify to the continued esteem in which he was held. Creatively, moreover, he continued to be as prolific as before, at least until he became bed-ridden following a broken hip in 1992. Even though what he composed represented more than ever before a revisiting of earlier works, he still wrote on a large scale, and he kept faith with the genre of the symphony to the end – seven of his last ten opuses are so entitled.

In an interview published in 1988, it was noted that he had suddenly decided to use the term ‘Chamber Symphony’ and he was asked the reason for this.

That’s true, I got a bit lost... You know, I simply didn’t want to continue the sequence of high numbers [after Symphony No. 20]... The new symphonies differ neither in length nor in character from the Second, the Seventh, or the Tenth Symphonies [which are also for chamber ensembles].

This was actually a mischievous answer. As he well knew, his first two chamber symphonies were essentially arrangements of his String Quartets Nos 2 and 3. Two years after the interview he was awarded the State Prize for these very works – the only such accolade ever to come his way. The irony of receiving such an award for music composed forty-five years earlier and never published can hardly have escaped him. Perhaps he even knew that the works were going to be considered by the prize committee and so deliberately withheld information about their
provenance.

Chamber Symphony No. 3

Three out of four movements of Chamber Symphony No. 3, Op. 151, composed early in 1990, are either based on or actual transcriptions from his String Quartet No. 5, Op. 27, composed in June and July 1945. The opening Lento, originally entitled ‘Melody’, begins with the extended, recitative-like melody, tenuously anchored in B flat major, that also opens the quartet. It diverges after the first page of the quartet score, however, allowing the theme to wander through the sections of the string orchestra and to take new directions. The wide-arching intervals and chorale-like harmonies hover stylistically somewhere between Mahler and Bartók, making this one of the most intensely romantic and confessional movements in Weinberg’s output. A short score draft of the Chamber Symphony in the family archive shows that Weinberg originally intended to proceed with the second movement of the quartet, ‘Humoresque’. Instead the finished symphony goes straight into the quartet’s boisterous third movement (originally ‘Scherzo’), extending it internally by the addition of a quick-march episode that quotes the song ‘Ten Brothers’ from Act II of his comic opera Mazl tov! of 1975. This quotation in turn provokes renewed development of the main scherzo idea. The Adagio third movement, which follows without a break, closely shadows the fourth movement, ‘Improvisation’, of the quartet, with adjustments to instrumentation and register, especially in the late stages. The music dissolves, and the finale follows, again attacca. This is a sad, wistful Andantino with the character of a waltz – the only movement in the symphony that is wholly independent of the Fifth Quartet. It spins itself out in free, improvisatory fashion, as if asserting its right to a kind of freedom, even if the cost of that freedom be solitariness. Elusive images supply contrast, among them a theme, first heard on solo instruments, that derives from the stylised ‘Sarabande’ in the second act of Weinberg’s operetta D’Artagnan in Love of 1971. The dynamic level only once rises above piano, in the Largo coda, before this troubled dream slips from our consciousness. The work was first heard in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on 19 November 1991 as part of that year’s Moscow Autumn Festival.

Chamber Symphony No. 4

Weinberg composed Chamber Symphony No. 4, Op. 153 in Moscow in April and May 1992, and dedicated it to his composer-friend Boris Chaykovsky (in fact as a gesture of hoped-for reconciliation, as their friendship had waned in the years preceding). The scoring is for string orchestra with the addition of an obbligato clarinet in A and a triangle, which is given just four notes in the entire piece, at points where it is easy for the clarinettist (or even the conductor) to play them, though the score itself contains no indication to that effect. This would be the composer’s penultimate work and the last that Weinberg completed, for Symphony No. 22 remained unorchestrated at his death. If we take this circumstance in conjunction with the work’s generally elegiac mood, we might be tempted to read Chamber Symphony No. 4 as a summation of his life and oeuvre. The composer himself hated clichés of this kind, however, and there is no evidence for reading his intention in any way comparable to, say, that of Shostakovich with respect to his last completed work, the Viola Sonata, Op. 147, in which he systematically includes literal quotations from every single one of his symphonies in turn. Nevertheless, self-quotation is a strong feature of the Fourth Chamber Symphony, as it was of the previous three.

The symphony opens with the chorale that Weinberg had used in the last two scenes of his opera The Portrait, based on Gogol, of 1980: first at the point where the Professor extols the embodiment of Russianness in art, later where the central character is descending into madness and contemplating the beauty of his own unfinished work, and then again when the artist hears voices that remind him of the vocation which he has allowed greed and ambition to spoil. Prior to The Portrait, Weinberg had also used the chorale in the penultimate song of his cycle Lulling the Child, Op. 110, in his Trio for Flute, Viola, and Harp, Op. 127, and, in slightly modified form, in String Quartet No. 17, Op. 146. After a couple of minutes, the clarinet makes its first appearance, joining the strings in a long, klezmer-like passage derived thematically from the finale of his Symphony No. 17, Op. 137. A repetition of the chorale brings this section to a close.

Without a break, a sudden fff outburst introduces the Allegro molto second section, a driving scherzo that proceeds via a disjointed theme recalling the ‘Burlesque’ from Bartók’s Sixth String Quartet. Quite late on, the clarinet ushers in a succession of monologues, passed in turn to solo violin and cello, which eventually conclude the movement on an unresolved tritone.

The third section, which likewise follows almost without a break, is an Adagio that begins with a gentle, yearning, folk-like theme from the clarinet, derived from the fifth movement of Weinberg’s song cycle Reminiscences, Op. 62. Here it is spun out over haunting triads in open position, which pass in parallel motion and strongly recall, without actually quoting, the third song, ‘Verses on Dead Hope’, from that same cycle. The section continues with an impressive build-up from the strings. A high-lying doublebass solo brings back the chorale from the opening of the work, and at the passionate climax the clarinet reappears, this time merely reinforcing the string texture. The section ends with a varied reprise of its opening.

The final Andantino begins with the first triangle stroke, heralding a folk-like theme for the clarinet, derived from material which Weinberg had just composed for the play Trudnïye lyudi (Difficult People), by the Israeli author Yosef Bar-Yosef (b. 1933), for the Sovremennik (Contemporary) Theatre in Moscow, in a section entitled ‘Bright Days’. The music follows an undemonstrative course, until tension mounts, through a recall of the second section, towards a declamatory cadenza for the clarinet, which in turn is brought to a halt by a dismissive pizzicato gesture in violas, cellos, and basses. The symphony then fades into its home key of B major, with enigmatic descending pizzicato triads and a final stroke on the triangle, like a pin-prick of light amid encircling gloom.

One of the most beautifully expressed responses to the music of Weinberg is that of his friend and composer-colleague Grigory Frid (1915 – 2012) to the Fourth Chamber Symphony. A one-time pupil of Vissarion Shebalin (1902 – 1963), and best known for his opera monologue The Diary of Anne Frank (1969), Frid was also famous in Russian musical life for the Moscow Youth Music Club which he organised from 1965 and which he continued to run into his mid-nineties. His volume of memoirs, entitled Journey to the Invisible Side of Paradise, is structured around a visit in 1998 to his children in the United States. It describes a day trip by car to the summit of Mount Evans, Colorado, along the highest paved road in the country. There he chanced to hear Weinberg’s Fourth Chamber Symphony on the car radio, and he wove his imaginative reactions to the music around impressions of the journey and recollections of his friend. His description of the music bears excerpting, though its full effect depends on the sustained analogy which Frid draws between his literal journey and Weinberg’s metaphorical one.

The gentle consonances on the strings – violins, violas – born from silence, wove a delicate web, through which were heard some kind of children’s song, or lullaby: a secret pondering, hidden away by a Jewish mother, fearing that sly, little domestic dybbuks [in cabbalistic tradition devils, more specifically souls of dead sinners in the body of the living] would get to hear of it and pour corruption over her child...

The caressing consonances are taken up again, and beneath the accompanimentof pizzicato strings sounds a quiet, sorrowful melody on the clarinet. Sorrowful, even though in the major. But in Weinberg’s music major is sorrowful and minor is bright, for everything in this unstable world is woven from grief and happiness, from fear and hopes...

In the music, yet again the gentle intonations have appeared in the violins and violas, circling like a little bird on its nest with its chicks...

I shook at the unexpected fortissimo... God knows what Weinberg was thinking of... But at his command, on the foundation of the despairing tremolo of the strings, the clarinet has begun to rush about – up, down, for a moment resting within the limits of the stave, then urgently rising above it...

© 2015 David Fanning




Founded in 1912, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra is one of Sweden’s oldest orchestras, now numbering sixty-one members. Its principal conductors over the years have included Sten Frykberg, John Frandsen, and Okko Kamu. The Orchestra is one of the region’s international leaders and ambassadors, and in January 2013 performed three sold-out concerts at the Großes Festspielhaus in Salzburg. Under Andrew Manze, principal conductor from 2006 to 2014, the Orchestra developed a distinctive sound – clear, fluid, and expressive – which has made it renowned and sought after for both concerts and recordings, its discography now including CDs of the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms. Having been appointed principal conductor of the Sinfonieorchester des Norddeutschen Rundfunks at the beginning of the 2014 / 15 season, Andrew Manze was succeeded by the Swedish-born maestro Stefan Solyom, former General Music Director of the Deutsches Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar. Alongside its core activities, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra aims to reach all the residents of the city of Helsingborg. It is attempting to break down barriers and create a gateway to the musical arts for people who are less accustomed to symphonic music. It hopes to achieve this through new concert arrangements that simplify traditional concert practices, while enhancing educational and social activities and offering various concerts for children and young people.


The Swedish conductor Thord Svedlund is a highly experienced and versatile musician, educated in Sweden, The Netherlands, and the USA. He possesses a vast knowledge of repertoire and his conducting career has for decades earned him praise by critics and audiences alike. He has conducted several Swedish orchestras, including the Gothenburg, Malmö, Norrköping, Helsingborg, Gävle, and Umeå symphony orchestras, as well as the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Nordica, Göteborg Wind Orchestra, and Odense Symphony Orchestra. He has recorded for radio, film, and television on numerous occasions. Keenly interested in inspiring young music students to play together, he has frequently worked with the Gothenburg University Orchestra, as well as on other projects with young musicians. He has taken a special interest in promoting the music of the Polish-born composer Mieczysław Weinberg; hence he was invited to conduct music by Weinberg in the ancient Polish town of Toruń. His discography presents recordings of music by composers ranging from Bach and Haydn to contemporary Swedish masters. This is the fifth SACD of orchestral music by Weinberg that Thord Svedlund has recorded for Chandos.




The ongoing SACD series of orchestral works by Weinberg now explores some lesser-known, late works of the composer. This album features the last two Chamber Symphonies, which indeed reflect a largely hidden, yet still prolific period of his life. The Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, recording with Chandos for the first time, is conducted by the highly experienced and versatile Thord Svedlund.

Not only is Chamber Symphony No. 4 the penultimate work that Weinberg completed, but it can also be read as a summation of his entire life and oeuvre. The elegiac mood shaping the piece echoes his last decade – of infirmity, loss of friends to death and emigration, and gradual decline in public and professional interest in his work. Then each movement shares some reminiscences of Weinberg’s life: the placid strings weaving a delicate childlike lullaby; the opening chorale having already been used in some of Weinberg’s masterpieces; and the folk-like themes of the solo clarinet in the last two movements deriving from others.

Apart from the sad, wistful last movement (Andantino) heralding No. 4, Chamber Symphony No. 3 is closely linked to String Quartet No. 5, Op. 27 through its recitative-like melody. At the same time, it perfectly justifies both the term ‘Chamber Symphony’ and the orchestra here playing it: the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1912, originally as a chamber orchestra, and now has claims to being one of the oldest in Sweden.

Chandos Records - www.chandos.net



“… The Swedish conductor Thord Svedlund has already directed four Chandos Super Audio CDs of Weinberg’s concertos and symphonies, and now conducts the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra in excellent performances of Weinberg’s Chamber symphonies Nos 3 and 4…”

Terry Robbins - April/May 2015
TheWholeNote.com



“…These are fine performances of accessible music which deserves to be much better known, where Weinberg’s voice speaks with disarming clarity. Ripe sound, and good notes…”

Graham Rickson - 28 February 2015
The Artsdesk.com



Performance ****          Recording *****
 
“…this new release boasts superior orchestral playing and a more nuanced view of the music supported by an outstanding recording. Collectors of Chandos’s already excellent Weinberg series should seriously consider investing in this disc, particularly for the memorable Third Chamber Symphony.”
 
Erik Levi - March 2015
BBC Music magazine



"... This is a fine addition to the Weinberg discography ..."

Richard Whitehouse - January 2015
International Record Review



“…The Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra under Thord Svedlund make an excellent case for these intriguing pieces and Chandos brings them to us with vivid immediacy…”

Edward Seckerson - February 2015
Gramophone magazine



Album of the Week
 
"...The Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra with Thorn Svedlund play with an intensity untempered by discretion. Must be heard."  *****

Norman Lebrecht - 19 January 2015
SinfiniMusic.com



Performance *****             Sonics *****

Chandos’s fine survey of the orchestral works of Mieczyslaw Weinberg conducted by Thord Svedlund continues with this release of two of the composer’s late works. The two Chamber Symphonies on this beautifully recorded SACD date from the 1990s and show Weinberg’s creative powers to be undimmed even within four years of his death… The recordings made in the Konserthuset, Helsingborg (4-7 March 2014) … could hardly be bettered in capturing both the acoustic ambience of the hall and the vividness of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra’s strings over a wide dynamic range. The exceptionally informative liner notes by David Fanning are invaluable for their insights into both the background to these compositions and their musical content... Those who enjoy Weinberg’s music need not hesitate.”
 
Graham Williams – SA-CD.net – 5 January 2015
SinfiniMusic.com




"...These two works are very enjoyable, and would be a good entrée into the Weinberg world ..."

David Barker - 29 December 2014
MusicWeb-International.com
 

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