Mieczysław Weinberg - String Quartets Vol. 6 (Quatuor Danel)

Information

Composer: Mieczysław Weinberg

• String Quartet No. 2, Op. 3
• String Quartet No. 12, Op. 103
• String Quartet No. 17, Op. 146

Quatuor Danel

    Marc Danel, violin

    Gilles Millet, violin

    Vlad Bogdanas, viola

    Guy Danel, cello

Date: 2012

Label: CPO

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Review

Since forming in 1991, the Quatuor Danel has made a particular study of Weinberg and this disc is the final volume in a complete survey of his string quartets. It is, therefore, a particular joy that they play with such insight, as well as accuracy and homogeneity of tone and ensemble. There is no hint of the victim in this music (whether or not the overarching mood happens to be positive), as you can hear in the work of many composers who lived through decades of constant, aggressive political change. Instead, it is imbued with a sense of pride in how greatness manages to flourish above all.

Rather than record each of the 17 quartets in sequence, the Danels have ordered each disc as a career-spanning spread, by which policy this volume should be particularly representative as it includes one of Weinberg’s earliest (No 2, written in 1939, although revised in 1986) alongside the last, from 1986. That Weinberg’s reluctance to display any political bias brings such an innocent optimism and purity to his work is sensitively respected by the Danels, who never open out the tone into something unnecessarily thickset. (This can be a bit at odds with the audible heavy breathing at times, which is only ever really acceptable as a backdrop to music that could be described as more lugubrious.) Instead they encourage the listener to follow the change from a certain naivety in the early examples to a more wry outlook at the end of his life. They also manage with great control the slow thematic development to which Weinberg was partial, as they do his greatly varied melody, which can range from the expansively beautiful to the reedily spooky.

— Caroline Gill

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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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Quatuor Danel is a French/Belgian string quartet established in June 1991. The ensemble has worked with the Amadeus Quartet, the Borodin Quartet, as well as members of the Beethoven Quartet and the LaSalle Quartet. Known for classical, early modern and contemporary repertoire, they tour internationally and have an extensive discography. They have both recorded and performed the first complete cycle of string quartets by Mieczysław Weinberg, as well as a complete cycle of the quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich. Since 2005, the Danel has been "Quartet in Residence" at the University of Manchester.

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