Unearth Soviet-era Pieces(转发)

Major labels have shown a consistent reluctance to record Mieczysław Weinberg’s music except occasionally, and then invariably in the presence of a prominent Russian performer, as when Rostropovich persuaded EMI to record the Cello Concerto in D Minor. Gidon Kremer has been a staunch champion of the composer, but where he enjoyed success advocating for Philip Glass and Alfred Schnittke on DG, the yellow kept away from Weinberg. It set a recent precedent, however, by releasing a widely admired disc of two Weinberg symphonies, Nos. 2 and 21, under Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla, who also happened to be the first woman conductor to sign with DG. Kremer and this Kremerata Baltica participated in those performances.

I’m glad to see one of Weinberg’s major chamber works, the Piano Trio in A Minor, included here, but it must be conceded that like many prolific composers, and particularly Soviet ones, his output is quite variable. Although he suffered under the anti-Semitism endemic in the Stalinist era (some would say endemic to Russia in any era), Weinberg was part of the state music apparatus, and under the Communist system he was expected to manufacture product with assembly-line regularity. The sheer bulk of compositions, not just with him but with a fellow composer like Miaskovsky, has made it difficult to winnow the wheat from the chaff.

These thoughts came to mind listening to this new chamber music collection. Three Pieces for Violin and Piano was composed in the winter of 1934–35 when Weinberg was only 15. It’s entertaining music that shows a remarkable aptitude in someone who had yet to receive formal training in composition. But his father was a violinist and conductor in the Jewish theaters of Warsaw, and Mieczysław was gifted enough as a pianist to enter the Warsaw Conservatory at 12. The first piece, “Nokturn,” is the kind of sentimental tune he probably heard every day in the Jewish theaters. The second piece is a lively if fairly anonymous Scherzo, but the third piece, “Dream of a Doll,” is more original, an eerie evocation that has unusual touches like the violin playing continuous double stops against an independent piano melody.

Kremer and pianist Yulianna Avdeeva (gold medalist at the 2010 International Chopin Competition) give a sophisticated reading, but one wonders why ingenious juvenilia deserved a place here. Weinberg composed his Piano Trio in 1945 living in Moscow. He was the only member of his immediate family to escape the Holocaust, and the program notes make a connection between that and the trio. “This traumatic experience left a lasting mark on him, encouraging him again and again to explore the themes of war, loss and the Holocaust in his music.” No doubt Russia’s catastrophic suffering in World War II was no small motivation, either.

At the time he and Shostakovich were such close friends that they saw each other every day, played the piano together, and exchanged compositional ideas. To give him independent stature, commentators often try to divorce Weinberg from Shostakovich’s influence, but the Piano Trio sounds almost like pastiche Shostakovich, who had written his Piano Trio No. 2 in 1944. The absorption of Shostakovich’s idiom is almost uncanny, and frankly, it works to the music’s benefit. The four movements, Prelude and Aria, Toccata, Poem, and Finale, evoke with lesser inspiration the range of moods, melancholy air, mocking irony, and hints of folk music we hear in Shostakovich’s piece. There are inner references to Shostakovich’s trio along with Weinberg’s own works, such as the Piano Quintet.

Weinberg’s design here isn’t very strong technically, but his melodic gifts and skill at creating atmosphere are striking enough to carry the piece. The present performance seems exemplary in every respect, with Avdeeva especially good at a piano part rivaling the one Shostakovich put into his trio. She and Kremer are in total sympathy in the frequent passages that sound almost like a violin-and-piano sonata. Few major works are this derivative and yet this successful at the same time.

In later life Weinberg withdrew into himself, and although his output remained prolific, the music was often inferior. Violin Sonata No. 6 was composed in 1982 but never published; it was discovered among his papers in 2007. The idiom is spare and angular, often reduced to the violin and piano playing solo for a considerable stretch or colliding without much interest. As an example of Weinberg attempting to create a novel sound, the result is insignificant beside the violin sonatas of Bartók, whose savagery makes Weinberg’s efforts seem merely pesky.

Kremer would have served the composer better by filling the program with first-rate works. As it is, despite the outstanding performances, one is still left pondering vastly inconsistent music. I imagine a deep dive into Miaskovsky, Silvestrov, Jurowski, and Khachaturian would unearth Soviet-era pieces of higher worth than most of what we hear on this disc.