{"id":40132,"date":"2016-11-21T10:43:35","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T15:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=40132"},"modified":"2016-11-21T10:43:35","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T15:43:35","slug":"record-keeping-weinberg-naxos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2016\/11\/21\/record-keeping-weinberg-naxos\/","title":{"rendered":"RECORD KEEPING | Mieczyslaw Weinberg Gets His Due"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Weinberg:
Weinberg: Symphony No. 17 Op. 137 \u201cMemory\u201d. Suite for Orchestra. Siberian State Symphony Orchestra\/Vladimir Lande. Naxos 8.573565. Total Time: 64:49.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) has only recently begun to receive the recognition he deserves. Born in Warsaw, Poland, he spent most of his life in Moscow, where he was encouraged in his career by Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), an older contemporary. Despite Shostakovich\u2019s support, Weinberg remained largely unknown outside the Soviet Union, even in his later years. He spent five years in prison for alleged \u201cJewish subversion\u201d and was only released when Stalin died in 1953. He wrote 22 symphonies and this new recording of Symphony No. 17 (\u201cMemory\u201d), written in 1984, was one of the major compositions of his later years.<\/p>\n

Stylistically, Weinberg\u2019s compositions can be compared to those of Shostakovich; that is to say, although he was composing into the 1990s, he remained a traditionalist, unaffected by the experimentalism of his era. Weinberg\u2019s music is basically tonal, and his use of the orchestra is similar to that of Shostakovich in his symphonies. Like Shostakovich, he had a predilection for long and brooding symphonic movements with extended melodies, and often related his music to historical events in the Soviet Union. The title \u201cMemory\u201d for Symphony No. 17, for example, refers to recollections of World War II, or \u201cThe Great Patriotic War\u201d as it is often called in Russia. Although the work has no detailed program, it does have an epigraph by the poet Anna Akhmatova, which provides some context:<\/p>\n

My country you have regained
\nYour power and freedom!
\nBut in the treasure-house of the people\u2019s memory
\nThere will always remain
\nThe incinerated years of war<\/p>\n

Symphony No. 17 was the first composition of a trilogy entitled \u201cOn the Threshold of War\u201d, composed between 1984 and 1986. Forty-five minutes long, this symphony seems to me to run out of meaningful things to say well before the end. That said, the use of a pair of clarinets accompanied by pizzicato strings in an extended episode at the beginning of the last movement is a notable feature.<\/p>\n

The filler item on this CD is the Suite for Orchestra (1950). According to the program notes by Richard Whitehouse, very little is known about this piece and this is its first recording. What we do know is that Weinberg was struggling during this period (the waning years of the Stalin era) and that he survived partly by writing music for the theatre and the circus. Not surprising then, that several of the movements in the Suite \u2014 the \u201cHumoresque\u201d and the \u201cGalop\u201d \u2014 sound very much like circus music. This piece certainly confirms the fact that Weinberg had a lighter side and when so inspired, he could write music that was quite entertaining.<\/p>\n

Conductor Vladimir Lande is in the process of recording a seventeen-volume cycle (already released are recordings of the Symphonies 6, 12, 18 and 19) of Weinberg\u2019s orchestral music for Naxos. The performances on this CD, of both the Symphony No. 17 and the Suite by the Siberian State Symphony Orchestra (Krasnoyarsk) are very good.<\/p>\n

Not only is Weinberg\u2019s music finally receiving the recognition it deserves by recording companies, it is also being programmed more often in both the United States and Canada: for example, his opera, The Passenger <\/em>(1968),<\/em> has been produced in both Houston (Houston Grand Opera, 2014) and Chicago (Lyric Opera, 2015); the TSO\u2019s (Toronto Symphony Orchestra) Joaquin Valdepe\u00f1as, has recorded his Clarinet Sonata; and violinist Gidon Kremer is performing his Violin Concerto all over the continent this season.<\/p>\n

#LUDWIGVAN<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

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Weinberg’s takes another step forward with a new release by Naxos featuring Symphony No. 17 and Suite for Orchestra.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":40136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5723,77,5739,51,52],"tags":[6539,2352,6538],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/11\/20161017175524_81998.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-ari","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40132"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40132"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40138,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40132\/revisions\/40138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40132"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=40132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}