WEINBERG Children’s Songs. Beyond the Border of Past Days. Rocking the Child • Olga Kalugina (sop); Svetlana Nikolayeve (mez); Dmitri Korostelyov (pn) • TOCCATA 0078 (60:12Text and Translation)
Mieczyslaw Weinberg (to use what has become the preferred spelling of a composer whose music is hard to find because of the various ways he is listed—Vainberg, Vaynberg, Weinberg) was born in Poland in 1919. He spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, and was a close friend and colleague of Shostakovich, whose influence on Weinberg was very strong.Weinberg had fled the Nazis in 1939, escaping from a horror that saw his parents and sister murdered, settling first in Minsk then hiding again from Nazis in Uzbekistan. In 1943, Shostakovich invited him to move to Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1996. Weinberg wrote 26 symphonies (one fewer than Miaskovsky!), 17 string quartets, other chamber works, a few hundred songs, sonatas and concertos for various instruments, seven operas, much incidental music for film and the theater, and much else. His music is finally being discovered by an enterprising record industry that has run out of room for more Beethoven or Mahler! If it is unlikely that Weinberg will enter the central canon in a way that Shostakovich has, it does seem as if he might occupy an important place on the periphery, perhaps similar to that now occupied by Nielsen.
It is easy to point to the Shostakovich influences on his music; one hears it in many of the songs that make up these three cycles (particularly Rocking the Child). But he is not a carbon copy of Shostakovich, and certainly not a “poor man’s Shostakovich.” Weinberg has his own musical face, and the more of his music one hears, the more familiar it becomes. The Shostakovich relationship is handy as a tool for placing Weinberg, stylistically, to someone unfamiliar with his music. If you respond to the music of Shostakovich, you are very likely to find Weinberg attractive.
But there is a touch more restraint and straight-forward lyricism in Weinberg; he doesn’t always show the anguish, the pain that one hears in Shostakovich’s scores, nor does he demonstrate quite the same degree of sarcastic wit. Not that those qualities are not there (and there are some works, such as the Requiem, that sear with their pain), but they are perhaps just a bit less extreme in Weinberg. The Jewish influence on Weinberg’s music is strong—and although Shostakovich was influenced by klezmer and other Jewish musical traditions (just listen to the Piano Trio), it is a more integral and consistent part of Weinberg’s art, perhaps stemming in part from his roots as a pianist and conductor at a Warsaw Jewish theater. It is particularly present in the Children’s Songs and Rocking the Child, more subtle in Beyond the Border of Past Days.
The Children’s Songs, op. 13, are set to poems by Itzhol Lejb Perez; Beyond the Border of Past Days sets poems by Alexander Blok (Shostakovich’s Blok songs are among his finest); and Rocking the Child to poems of Gabriela Mistral. The Perez and Mistral poems are translated into Russian and set in that language. Thanks to Toccata Classics for providing Cyrillic and English texts (no transliteration, but that seems only a minor problem). Excellent notes by David Fanning round out the high production values.
The two singers are satisfying. Children’s Songs and Rocking the Child are for soprano, Beyond the Border of Past Days for mezzo. Both singers have a bit of what we like to call that Slavic edge, but it is not too severe. Both are masterful at shaping the music, and they and pianist Dmitri Korostelyov do not seem to be sight-reading the material at all. One feels that they are deeply into the music. Natural and well-balanced sound completes the picture. This disc is a major addition to the catalogue, introducing us to some deeply moving music.
