Mieczysław Weinberg - String Quartets Vol. 2 (Quatuor Danel)

Information

Composer: Mieczysław Weinberg

• String Quartet No. 7 in C major, Op. 59
• String Quartet No. 11 in F major, Op. 89
• String Quartet No. 13, Op. 118, in one movement

Quatuor Danel

    Marc Danel, violin

    Gilles Millet, violin

    Vlad Bogdanas, viola

    Guy Danel, cello

Date: 2008

Label: CPO

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Review

The Quatuor Danel continues its assignment to record the complete string quartets of Weinberg for cpo. It’s something they have so far managed with assurance and a complete appreciation of the idioms involved. Volume 2 presents quartets nos. 7, 11 and 13, three works spanning two decades.

No 7 shares a Beethoven Rasumovsky quartet opus number, Op. 59. It was written in 1957. It opens slowly and highly expressively, reminiscent of Shostakovich’s First Quartet perhaps – the name is obviously unavoidable when discussing Weinberg. There are rather formalized klezmer themes in the central movement, and they flicker and fleck the music’s texture, in a way that is mesmerically insistent. The third movement is the longest and it takes us back to the opening before unleashing a powerful set of variations. The writing here is alternately terse and brittle, with an urgent, thrumming galvanising the rhythmic basis of it. But there are also pizzicato and lyrical moments too, at least until the concluding and powerful Adagio section ends it.

Nine years later Weinberg wrote his Eleventh quartet. What impresses here is the sheer clarity of the writing, its rhythmically pointed character and the Shostakovich-influenced sense of colour and thematic writing. It’s in the Allegretto that Weinberg unleashes some remarkable muted passages, fugitive and furtive; totally intriguing. Withdrawn and still the slow movement prefaces the ambiguous quietude of the finale, with its interrogative interplay. This is a fascinating work, brilliantly played.

The Op.118 quartet is the shortest, and is cast in one movement. The vague melancholy of its opening gives way to a demarcated scherzo section around 4:00 in this recording. The strong sawing unison figures are exciting whilst the expressive temperature remains terse. The brittle gestures may be reflective of the fact that Shostakovich had died the previous year. It’s certainly not a threnody, more a brusque, unsettled rejoinder.

The recorded sound in the Cologne studio has been well gauged: it’s not too chilly, but its clarity doesn’t preclude warmth. David Fanning’s notes are excellent.

— 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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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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