WEINBERG String Quartets Nos. 1–17. Capriccio. Aria • Qrt Danel • CPO 777913 (6 CDs: 436:41)


If you’ve not been collecting CPO’s Weinberg string quartet cycle with the Danel Quartet, here’s your chance to acquire it complete—all 17 quartets—in a boxed set, selling for under $8 per disc at ArkivMusic. It’s not as if there’s a lot of competition, either. The Pacifica Quartet included Weinberg’s Sixth Quartet in Volume 3 of its complete Shostakovich quartet cycle. There’s a single Delos CD of Weinberg’s quartets 11 and 13, performed by the Vilnius String Quartet; one surviving Olympia CD containing the quartets 7, 8, and 9, played by a group calling itself the Dominant Quartet; and a No. 8 recorded by the Borodin String Quartet for Melodiya. And that, to the best of my knowledge, is about it, at least insofar as what’s currently available on CD. I don’t know if a complete Weinberg quartet cycle was ever undertaken in the LP era.


Mieczys?aw Weinberg (1919–1996) has long stood in the eclipsing shadow of his close contemporary and loyal friend Shostakovich. But Weinberg’s neglect is not entirely due to his being judged the lesser of the two composers; much of it is due to his being charged, and not entirely without good reason, as being a shameless Shostakovich imitator.


Anyone who is familiar with Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets and who listens to Weinberg’s quartets can’t entirely deny the accusation, for there is at least a kernel of truth to it. One hears many of the same techniques—the lengthy and sometimes fierce rhythmic ostinatos, the corrosive dissonances, and the hollow, haunted-sounding melodies—as well as many of the same emotional states—the feeling of bone-chilling cold, the sense of caustic, cruel irony, and a palpable perception that perpetual tragedy is life’s natural condition.


Certainly the Jewish Weinberg had even more cause for such a bleak outlook than Shostakovich did. Born in a Warsaw ghetto, Weinberg was the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust, and but for Shostakovich’s intervention and Stalin’s sudden death, he almost didn’t survive a Soviet purge of Jews in 1953 that came to be known as the “Doctors’ Plot.”


Before receiving this six-disc set, I was familiar with only two or three of Weinberg’s quartets, and I can tell you that now, after listening to all of them, my previous skepticism has been transformed into genuine enthusiasm. The first thing I learned is that the “Jewish” element is more pronounced and more pervasive in Weinberg’s music than it is in Shostakovich’s, no doubt an artifact of his childhood years in a family of itinerant Yiddish theater performers.


The second thing I discovered was that there is an underlying lyrical lilt to much of Weinberg’s writing, especially in the earlier quartets, that doesn’t sound all that strongly influenced by Shostakovich. The Fourth Quartet, for example, composed in 1945, after Weinberg had already been in the Soviet Union for several years and had already struck up his relationship with Shostakovich, is a real melodic beauty.


Only Weinberg’s First Quartet, dating from 1937, was written in Poland, two years before the composer fled the country ahead of the Nazi invasion; and it was one of only two of his 17 quartets he would later revise. It’s the revised version, made almost 50 years later in 1986, that’s performed here by the Danel Quartet, the original being practically illegible in many parts, according to the album note.


The Second Quartet, dating from 1940 and composed shortly after Weinberg had arrived in Minsk, was also extensively revised almost 50 years later in 1987, but that revision, bearing a different opus number, was rescored as a chamber symphony, so that the quartet stands as an independent work.


After that, Weinberg’s output of string quartets remains pretty steady up until 1987. He wrote no more quartets in the last nine years or so of his life, but he did write a 20th Symphony, three more chamber symphonies, a flute concerto, and most curiously, a “Kaddish” Symphony, his penultimate work—curiously, because it’s reported that just two months before his death in Moscow, he converted to Orthodox Christianity.


The quartets are arranged in the order they were originally released on the individual CPO discs, which means they’re not ordered chronologically, skipping randomly from one to another. The First Quartet doesn’t show up until Volume 5, while the second to the last quartet, No. 16, is on Volume 1. But if you purchase this set, I strongly suggest that you listen to the cycle in numeric/chronological order, because that way it becomes easy to hear Weinberg’s writing before he fell so profoundly under Shostakovich’s influence, during the period of that influence, and after it. The last five of Weinberg’s quartets were, in fact, composed between 1977 and 1987, post-Shostakovich’s death in 1975.


By listening to the quartets in this way, one hears the many different influences that Weinberg was subject to. In the first two or three quartets, there’s a strong sense of Berg and the music of the Second Viennese School, as well as of Bartók, which Weinberg would probably have been exposed to during his studies at the Warsaw Conservatory. Then we encounter the Shostakovich influence from about quartets Nos. 5 or 6 through 12. But along the way, Weinberg had to have encountered Prokofiev and Myaskovsky too. The last five quartets, Nos. 13 through 17, largely continue in the vein of Weinberg’s now deceased mentor, Shostakovich, but more Modernist elements of other Soviet composers active at the time, for example, Alfred Schnittke, begin to creep into Weinberg’s writing.


I realize that all of these discs have been (and still are) available individually; these are not brand new releases, but presented here as a complete cycle, I believe this set represents an important milestone in the Weinberg revival, and it affords us a fuller perspective on this neglected Soviet-era composer. These quartets make for really interesting and, for the most part, really rewarding listening.


The Danel Quartet, which already recorded a complete Shostakovich cycle for Fuga Libera and a number of other works by mostly 20th-century French composers, is truly superb, and CPO’s recordings are clear, bright, and perfectly balanced. This is very strongly recommended to anyone interested in becoming acquainted with a major body of 20th-century string quartet music.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

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WEINBERG String Quartets Nos. 1–17. Capriccio. Aria • Qrt Danel • CPO 777913 (6 CDs: 436:41)


Initially released as individual discs between 2007 and 2012, this set of Weinberg’s 17 quartets plus the capriccio and aria seems to have flown, by and large, under the critical radar. I could only find a few reviews online: Vol. 1 by Steve Schwartz at Classical Net, Vols. 1 and 3 by Barry Brenesal here in Fanfare, Vol. 5 by Gary Higginson at MusicWeb International, and Vols. 1, 4, and 6 at allmusic.com, although Quatuor Danel’s complete set of the Shostakovich quartets on Fuga Libera garnered high praise from James Leonard at the latter web site.


As is so often the case with sets of complete quartets or symphonies, the works are presented well out of order. Vol. 1 contains quartets Nos. 4 and 16; Vol. 2 quartets Nos. 7, 11, and 13; Vol. 3 quartets 6, 8, and 15; Vol. 4 quartets 5, 9, and 14; Vol. 5 quartets Nos. 1, 3, and 10 (along with the capriccio and aria); and Vol. 6 quartets 2, 12, and 17. I wish I had a window into the heads of record producers, and thus had some idea to give you as to why we get these things in such a crazy-quilt pattern. It would be one thing, I believe, if they had only recorded six or nine of the 17 quartets. In that case, you might expect that they’d be programmed for contrast’s sake and not chronologically, but when you get a complete set of 17 works written over a long span of time and in differing styles, I really appreciate being able to hear them in the order of composition so as to get a hold on the composer’s mindset and growth as an artist.


Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, all I can say about this music—individually per quartet and as a whole—is that it is simply astonishing that this poor guy was ignored for so many decades. The reason, one fathoms from reading his biography, was not as mysterious as it may seem considering the exceptionally high quality of his work. As a Polish-Jewish refugee who fled to the Soviet Union to get away from the Nazis, only to find that he was now persecuted by his new country, he refused to become a member of the Communist Party and thus worked almost completely outside the system. His good friend Shostakovich had to send a letter to the head of the secret police to save Weinberg’s skin at one point, so the composer was never executed or sent to a Gulag, but he didn’t have an easy life; and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was so little known except by a few musicians who were friends and confidantes of Shostakovich that he was still pretty much ignored even within the New Russia.


Since the opening disc pairs an early quartet and his last one, we come to appreciate his stylistic differences between the early and late Weinberg. In a nutshell, he was able to internalize much of his angst as he grew older and reflect on what had passed in a way that was less emotionally intense but no less personally meaningful. Thus in the Quartet No. 4 (op. 20), we hear a Weinberg who is still very strongly and emotionally scarred by the brutalities of the Nazi regime which he fled (similar angst maybe heard in his piano trio, which I review elsewhere in this issue), while the last quartet, dedicated to his sister Ester, who died in the camps, is more quiet and reflective if no less deeply felt. Structurally, however, it is the most conventional of all his works I have yet heard. The really fascinating thing about Weinberg in general is that no matter what the emotional stimulus of any given work, he was able to transform it into a musical statement that could be felt by others, his personal grief and angst thus becoming more universal in its message. In this respect, and in these particular works, Weinberg was Beethoven’s spiritual successor. One can very easily move from the late Beethoven quartets to Weinberg’s with no loss in musical interest and certainly no loss in emotional impact.


Curiously, the Quartet No. 7 that opens Vol. 2 is also a relatively quiet work, as the composer was apparently trying to placate the hostile Soviet authorities (his Quartet No. 6 was banned for a time by Stalin, though ironically, at another time, his music was praised by the Soviets “for depicting the shining, free working life of the Jewish people in the land of Socialism”). In terms of musical construction, however, it is less formal or conventional than the last quartet, the sustained invention of the work continually fascinating despite the low-key dynamics and often muted strings, though the music virtually explodes in the last movement.


The 11th Quartet (1966) is played almost entirely muted, with only large sections of the Adagio semplice (third movement) unmuted, played by individual members of the quartet as solos. This was yet another example of Weinberg’s originality of design, yet as usual with this composer one should not put too much stress on the structure; it is the musical progression, and the stories his music tells, that are one’s primary focus. Indeed, aside from the effects just noted, the overriding feeling one gets from this quartet is of an almost perpetual motion. One must praise the members of Quatuor Danel for their ability to play in different styles and moods throughout these quartets. In addition to the unusual string of solos in Quartet No. 11, Weinberg sometimes wrote for the strings to play off one another and sometimes to play as a unified group, and the unusual shape and textures of his music with its unusually varied attacks (not to mention extraordinarily fine shadings of dynamics, which are in constant flux from moment to moment) are not easy to play properly. I’m sure that many, many hours of rehearsal time went into these pieces.


The one-movement 13th Quartet, written shortly after the death of Shostakovich, is a structurally broken work in which, as the notes say, the “scherzo, slow movement and finale sections are weakly articulated and blurred by references back to the opening theme and by developmental recombination of ideas.” In terms of mood, however, Weinberg seems as upset about the unjust persecution his friend suffered as he was sad about his passing, as there are several angry-sounding passages in it, and its generally consonant harmonic base is at times disrupted by tense, edgy tone clusters.


Vol. 3 opens with the Quartet No. 6 from 1946, the one banned by Andrey Zhdanov for formalism. Although it bears Weinberg’s unmistakable stamp, particularly in his varied use of the strings at different points throughout the work, in melodic and harmonic terms it sounds, to me, the closest to Shostakovich. Still, one is constantly kept on one’s toes by its constant shifting of mood and rhythm (perhaps Zhdanov banned it because he couldn’t follow it!). I was particularly struck by the third movement, Allegro con fuoco, with its almost ferocious use of pizzicato effects, as well as by the canon used in the fourth movement ( Adagio ).


The Quartet No. 8, from 1959, is a one-movement work, but this time with three clear-cut sections to subdivide it. Despite this nod to conventional form, however, it is still music by Weinberg, which means that it is fascinating and diverse in its use of themes and development. Among these are his use of “sighing figures,” as the notes describe them, overlaid on the C-Major triad in the first movement, and the rondo-like Allegretto which forms itself into a second movement, with klezmer-like intonations used underneath. Occasionally, Weinberg strikes up a regular rhythm, but then slowly increases its pace until it becomes a sort of “whirling dervish” dance, with the string attacks becoming more intense as it changes from a dance to an insistent, driving rhythm. He solves his own musical puzzle, at last, by combining the opening section’s Adagio with a new phrase in which earlier themes are thrown into the musical blender with it, eventually putting its varied parts together.


The 15th Quartet (1980) is one of his strangest and most original, split into nine movements with metronome markings but no titles or expressive directions. Once again Weinberg uses mutes on the strings, in this case producing a murmuring, undulating effect that keeps trying to coalesce into a theme but never quite makes it. The music has an elusive quality, like trying to grab a handful of mist; you come close but never quite succeed in your quest. Here is a musical story told by allusion and innuendo, with nothing stated clearly and very little in the way of signposts for the listener to hold onto—at least, not until the surprisingly vivid, violent fourth movement, where the mutes are finally removed and the attacks are ferocious. From this point, the next three movements retain a constant level of loudness, even through a canon played by the two violins in minor seconds, eventually intruded upon by the other instruments as the music deconstructs. More than a vague hint of Beethoven is heard in the sixth movement as a snippet of the opening theme of one of his “Razumovsky” Quartets is tossed around between the strings. Weinberg brings back the mutes for the eight movement, a Bartók-like piece played in pizzicato, with ambiguous melodies again trying to form themselves. Eventually we reach the ninth and final movement, in which a sad, lyrical, yet broken melody again fails to coalesce.


Vol. 4 opens with Quartet No. 5 (1945), the opening tune of which—playing by solo violin—is one of the loveliest things Weinberg ever wrote, a piece he could easily have turned into a song. Indeed, even after the other instruments enter, one at a time, he continues to develop and evolve this gorgeous melody to almost Bellinian or Wagnerian proportions (tune-wise, not in terms of Wagnerian texture). Moreover, as the melody continues to morph, it becomes even more eloquent and touching. Here, again, we have a different approach from Weinberg, yet he is able to convince us, for the duration of this quartet, that it is right and meaningful. The second movement “Humoreska” is, for once, really a humorous tune, ambling along in its quirky, syncopated way like a tipsy hobo who thinks he’s walking a straight line but isn’t. In the development section of this movement, Weinberg ejects the syncopations and turns the melody into a more lyrical tune played by second violin and viola, while the first violin plays odd pizzicato figures above it; then, returning to the syncopations (now played by viola), the other three instruments lightly embroider its melody with pizzicato of their own. After a similarly wacky scherzo and an ethereal slow movement “Improvisation,” the quartet ends with a “Serenata” that sounds a bit like Haydn, or at least Prokofiev in a Haydnesque mood.


The Ninth Quartet (1963) reveals Weinberg attempting a slightly different format. The work is divided into four discrete movements, marked Allegro–attacca, Allegretto–attacca, Andante–attacca, and Allegro moderato . Moreover, he seems to have taken up the task of reinventing the “Classical” model of a quartet, its extremely dense and complex sonata form repeating both expositions and development sections. Rhythmically, this quartet follows more standard Classical rhythms, almost Stravinskian in their rigor and stiffness, the harmony often bitonal and constantly shifting sideways in and out of different keys. By this time one will have noted that one of Weinberg’s traits is to let the listener expect certain things, but then to pull the rug out from underneath. Themes are sometimes juxtaposed in strange and quirky ways, there are inspired leaps into strange realms, yet in the end he always seems able to pull it all together.


Quartet No. 14 (1978) is another of those with only metronome markings, no movement descriptions, and a furtive, almost mysterious method of composition and mood. The first movement’s almost ostinato rhythm tends towards Minimalism, at that time pretty much a new style, but Weinberg wasn’t interested in endless repetition of short thematic fragments. Here the intensity of his expression almost sounds like a howl of despair or anger, or both. There is also angst (and sorrow) in the slow movement, which almost sounds tonally based at first but soon veers off into strange harmonic territory. The third movement has a scherzo-like rhythm, but is subdued in mood and, again, sounds almost fragmented in its direction but is really quite well constructed. The slower fourth movement is also melancholy and despondent. The fifth and last movement seems to coalesce its musical materials more concisely, but eventually shifts feeling and focus, ending quietly—as the booklet says, “in unresolved thematic oppositions, tinged with fragile harmonics … and in a final inscrutable, white-note cadence.”


The opening of Weinberg’s very first quartet (Vol. 5), written in 1937 but revised in 1985, opens in such a way that it sounds as if you are already in the middle of the movement (a bit like the opening of the Mahler Sixth Symphony, only much quieter). Because the years of its initial composition and revision were so far apart, Weinberg assigned the quartet two opus numbers (2 and 141). The booklet explains that Weinberg left the quartet’s formal design and harmonies intact, but in 1985 was “recasting and clarifying the texture.” Even if you consider both this later maturity of texture and that some passages may indeed have been changed, this product of the 18-year-old composer is already a mature work, interesting and involving to hear. Although the notes throughout this series persistently compare Weinberg’s quartets to those of Shostakovich—a comparison I find unfair to both composers—for this one the annotator instead mentions its resemblance to some of Bartók’s and Szymanowski’s music. I, however, hear no real stylistic difference between this quartet and the later ones other than Weinberg’s own maturity and willingness to explore different forms of construction. In other words, I felt all along that Bartók was his real model, and the constant comparisons with Shostakovich are superficial and peripheral. Thus I hear some elements of Bartók not only in this First Quartet, but also in the Third Quartet which follows on this disc, although the Third is a bit more assertive. Weinberg was, simply, an excellent composer from about age 18 onward, and although he himself dismissed some of his early works in later life, there are some really fine pieces in his early oeuvre, as the early Aria (op. 9) and Capriccio (op. 11) that close this disc illustrate.


Between the First Quartet and these shorter pieces, however, is the Third Quartet (1944), and it is much the same as the Quartet No. 4 which followed, and if a shade less angst-ridden still on the “edgy” side. It’s a shame that so many younger listeners of “classical” music nowadays want soft, relaxing music, something to sip wine to and slip into a semiconscious state—“Mellow with Mozart” or “Zone Out with Zemlinsky.” Yes, that is certainly part of what classical music is about, too, but the music is also designed to project edgier, more intense emotions, and I for one can’t really imagine modern-day “nocturnivores” (as they describe themselves in a fast-food chain’s radio advertising) listening to many of these Weinberg quartets. What a pity.


The Tenth Quartet (1964) divides its four movements up into slow-fast-slow-fast, but once again Weinberg treats the whole quartet as if it were one continuous movement with different moods. The cello employs an unusually strong vibrato to lead into the first movement, but note here, again, how Weinberg leads the listener into thinking this opening melodic statement will develop into a broad, half-tone melody before breaking it up with strong accents on each of the four beats for several measures. As usual with this composer, the music continues to morph in its progression, becoming ever more melancholy as it simplifies the rhythm and indeed does become a succession of half notes, then whole notes. The second movement, with its broken, asymmetric rhythm, sort of sneaks up on the listener, in part because it is played softly with muted strings (another Weinberg trademark). By contrast to this scherzo, the third movement Adagio is played loudly and passionately on open strings—yet another twist for the listener. A long-held D? on the cello eventually morphs into the last movement’s opening, again quiet and almost calm in mood, but a semi-lively syncopated rhythm is set up which then leads into other themes, including a somewhat simple waltz, before winding its way in roundabout fashion to another cryptic finale, another tale told via allusion and musical metaphor. The early capriccio is, to my ears, very strongly influenced by Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, the aria influenced by—Gabriel Fauré? That’s what it sounded like to me, and I was happy that the liner notes agreed with my assessment.


CD 6 begins with Quartet No. 2, another piece (like Quartet No. 1) that he revised much later in life, thus it bears the dual opus number of 3/145. Once again, I hear in this earlier work a lot of Prokofiev in his tongue-in-cheek Neoclassical style, but again filtered through Weinberg’s extraordinarily inventive mind. It almost boggles the imagination that, as Alex Ross put it in one of his New Yorker articles, Weinberg thought very little of his music and even gave up on getting his works published, let alone performed, during the last decade or more of his life. In the liner notes by Elisaveta Blumina for the CPO disc of Weinberg chamber works (reviewed elsewhere in this issue), the pianist mentions that his one claim to fame within Russia was that he wrote the music for Winnie the Pooh cartoons! (In fact, you can find some of those Russian Winnie cartoons from the late 1960s-early 70s on YouTube with Weinberg’s music in them.) It’s a bit like imagining a major figure such as Stravinsky giving up on himself, writing background music for George of the Jungle cartoons, then later not caring if his music was published or performed. I found this Second Quartet to be one of Weinberg’s lightest and wittiest; one might be forgiven for thinking it was written before the Nazi horrors, but in fact it was composed between November 1939 and March 1940, the period during which he abandoned Poland (where his mother and sister were murdered) for Belarus.


The 13th Quartet (1969–70) is very much in the Bartók mold, even though the opening section smacks of serial music (and, in fact, the notes point out that these bars are “loosely based on a 12-tone aggregate”). It’s not so much an angry or angst-ridden quartet as it is one informed by a great deal of internal pain and confusion. To me, this music seems to say, “Why am I so alone? Why is no one on my side?” Believe me, I can relate. As usual, Weinberg never resorts to cheap effects, to heart-on-the-sleeve weeping. All of the emotions are internalized, all of his pain transformed into quiet yet meaningful musical statements. And, believe it or not, this quartet just gets stranger and stranger as it goes along, until you feel that Weinberg has completely wrapped himself up in his own private musical cocoon.


The 17th and last Quartet, ironically, returns us to the more playful, carefree Weinberg of his youth. Written in 1986 for the Borodin Quartet’s 40th anniversary, it is a joyful piece, quite different from the sad lament of the Quartet No. 16. Weinberg, at least quartet-wise, thus leaves us not with a bang or a whimper but with a smile.


At first, the recorded sound of this set didn’t seem to me as clear and crisp as the Blumina disc (CPO 777804), but as the music progressed I was pleased to discover that one could still hear the bite of the strings and that the visceral impact of this music was not dulled by mushy, gooshy sonics. This is, quite simply, a great set.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley