Leó Weiner - Senerade; Divertimentos (Neeme Järvi)

Information

Composer: Leó Weiner

• Serenade in F minor, Op. 3
• Divertimento No. 1 in D major, Op. 20
• Divertimento No. 2 in A minor, Op. 24
• Divertimento No. 3 in A major, Op. 25
• Divertimento No. 4 in G major, Op. 38
• Divertimento No. 5, Op. 39

Estonian National Symphony Orchestra

Neeme Järvi, conductor

Date: 2017

Label: Chandos

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Review

I demand to know what Neeme Järvi has for breakfast! At 80 years old, with nearly 500 recordings under his belt, he is still voracious in his appetite for under-explored repertoire. Here, Järvi turns his attention to Leó Weiner, who was just four years younger than Béla Bartók – they shared the same composition teacher at the Liszt Academy – but whose music very much looked back towards the 19th century. If Brahms’s Hungarian Dances and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies are your cup of tea – they were among my earliest loves when discovering classical music as a teenager – then Weiner’s Five Divertimentos should prove a delight.

The first two divertimentos are scored for strings alone but Weiner’s best music comes in the three later ones (composed between 1949 and 1951), scored for full orchestra. Rather than Bartók and Kodály’s method of collecting folk songs, Weiner used manuscripts of old Hungarian dances as his sources; and if I describe the results as Bartók-lite, that’s not meant in a derogatory way. There is plenty of charm in Weiner’s treatment of this often infectious music, often delicately scored. Solo woodwinds of the excellent Estonian National Symphony Orchestra have plenty of opportunities to shine: oboe and clarinet skirling as bagpipes; a bassoon offering the punchline to the Shepherd’s Joke; flute leading a gentle csárdás; or oily clarinet weaving a seductive cadenza in the ‘Verbunk from Pereg’ in the Fifth Divertimento. There’s plenty of swagger to numbers such as the ‘Song of Ignác Gábor’ in the Fourth Divertimento, with punch to Chandos’s weighty sound. The ENSO under Järvi offer slightly more verve and character to their performances than the North Hungarian Symphony Orchestra on a 2006 Hungaraton recording.

The Serenade (from 1906) is another charmer, where Järvi keeps the dance rhythms buoyant. Undemanding material but well worth seeking out for an entertaining listen.

— Mark Pullinger

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Leó Weiner (16 April 1885 – 13 September 1960) was one of the leading Hungarian composers and music educators of the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in Budapest and later studied at the Budapest Academy of Music, where he taught from 1908 to 1949. Among his many notable students were conductors Antal Doráti and Georg Solti, violinist Tibor Varga, cellist János Starker and pianist György Sebők. As a composer Weiner published about 30 works, including a string trio, three string quartets, two violin sonatas, five divertimenti for orchestra, a symphonic poem, and numerous chamber and piano pieces.

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Neeme Järvi (born June 7, 1937 in Tallinn) is an Estonian conductor. He studied at the Leningrad Conservatory under Evgeny Mravinsky and Nikolai Rabinovich, among others. Järvi was Principal Conductor and Music Director of the Gothenburg Symphony (1982-2004), Royal Scottish National Orchestra (1984-1988), Detroit Symphony Orchestra (1990-2005) and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (2012-2015), among others. He made over 400 recordings for labels such as BIS, Chandos and Deutsche Grammophon and best known for his interpretations of Romantic and 20th century classical music.

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