Mieczysław Weinberg - Piano Quintet; String Quartet No. 8 (Borodin Quartet)

Information

Composer: Mieczysław Weinberg

• Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 18
• String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 66

Mieczysław Weinberg, piano

Borodin Quartet

    Rostislav Dubinsky, violin

    Yaroslav Alexandrov, violin

    Dmitri Shebalin, viola

    Valentin Berlinsky, cello

Date: 1963; 1961 / 2005

Label: Melodiya

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Review

Two classic performances, one with the composer’s imprimatur as executant. The wartime Piano Quintet is a fascinating work written in five movements that bears some similarity with Shostakovich’s Piano Trio. Completed in 1944 it was first performed by Gilels and the Quartet of the Bolshoi Theatre. The melancholy lyricism of the first movement fuses with jagged march themes which in turn become more and more garrulous and menacing. By the Allegretto increasing motor rhythms and oily lines for solo strings and heavy rhythmic attacks – strong independent piano part, powerful unison strings – bring hints of baroque procedure and a grave conclusion. It’s a quintet that really covers all emotive states, from the almost manic first violin of the Presto to the stern passacaglia-like fourth movement Largo. Here the long, and limpidly sung piano is flecked with great gravity, a memorable movement. To my ears the finale has a weird Scotch snap to it – a scotch reel fugato if one can imagine it in the context of a Weinberg quintet and there are also moments of almost hallucinatory boogie; I couldn’t quite believe it. The ghostly mists gradually descend though and we end with fugitive and ambiguous quiet. It’s an unsettling work, kaleidoscopic, deeply rooted in Shostakovich of course but still sounding intensely personal.

Coupled with it is the 1959 Eighth Quartet. Once more the tugs of meditative control and melancholy drift are powerful poles around which the emotive motor turns. But the urgent expressivity is contrasted in the lighter moments with folkloric dance and drive and a return to the newly mobile material, which is now laced with pizzicati. It maybe in sonata form but its one movement multi-partite fifteen-minute span is tremendously impressive as a cohesive statement. There is real variety  - of mood, texture, rhythm, colour – and its performance here by its dedicatees, the Borodin Quartet - sounds well nigh definitive. 

Melodiya’s presentation is attractive and there are multi-lingual notes. There’s some audible tape hiss at moments in the 1963 recording of the Quintet though the earlier 1961 Quartet fares better in this respect. In any case it’s a very minor question and won’t at all impede your listening. These are two big, powerful and comprehensively impressive musical statements.

— Jonathan Woolf

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Mieczysław Weinberg (8 December 1919 – 26 February 1996) was a Polish-born Soviet and Russian composer and pianist. Born in Warsaw to a family connected with Yiddish theatre, he fled Poland in 1939 following the German invasion and settled in the Soviet Union, where he gained the support of Dmitri Shostakovich. Weinberg became a prolific and respected composer, particularly during the 1960s, when his concert and film music achieved considerable recognition. His later years were marked by declining health and reduced official support. International appreciation of his music grew significantly in the 1990s.

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The Borodin Quartet was formed in 1945 by four students from the Moscow Conservatory and remains one of the very few existing established chamber ensembles with uninterrupted longevity. The ensemble has survived many changes in personnel, with current members include Nicolai Sachenko, Sergei Lomovsky, Igor Naidin and Vladimir Balshin. The quartet was one of the Soviet Union's best known in the West during the Cold War era, through recordings and concert performances in the United States and Europe. Their recordings include works by a wide range of composers on the Melodiya, Teldec, Virgin, and Chandos labels.

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