This recording combines a selection of Weinberg's early works with the piano quintet and some of the children's notebooks from the last two years of...

This recording combines a selection of Weinberg's early works with the piano quintet and some of the children's notebooks from the last two years of the war. Born in Warsaw in 1919, Weinberg fled to Moscow in 1939. There he made friends with Shostakovich, who always supported him. Weinberg wrote numerous works, including 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets and numerous chamber music as well as his operas Wir gratulieren! (OC990) and Die Passagierin. Weinberg dies in Moscow in 1996. In addition to the pianist Elisaveta Blumina, Noah Bendix-Balgley, Shanshan Yao, Máté Szücs and Bruno Delepelaire also perform.

REVIEW:

Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Piano Quintet, Op. 18, nearly 45 minutes long, is the major work on this CD. It is in five movements and in a minor key. But unlike Shostakovich’s quintets in the same key, that by Weinberg is immediately communicative, at times admittedly with mysterious restraint, at others very direct and ample.

Pianist Elisaveta Blumina has long championed Weinberg’s work, and she has reunited an ad hoc ensemble for this recording that excitingly expresses the contrasting music. As a result, her interpretation reveals both an introverted and a very defiantly aggressive Weinberg, who struggles to come to terms with his life in Poland, where he lost his family.

Shortly after Weinberg fled Poland for the Soviet Union, he began composing a cycle of pieces, which he compiled into three so-called Kinderhefte. During this time, he also became acquainted with Shostakovich, who also happened to be working on a series of piano pieces. Shostakovich’s pieces were composed for his young daughter Galina and they are technically very simple. Weinberg’s pieces have much higher technical requirements. For Elisaveta Blumina, this seems to have been a spur, for her interpretations are of the greatest refinement, finely differentiated and always rhetorical.

-- Pizzicato