My first exposure to the music of Mieczysław Weinberg came from his heartrending score to the award-winning 1957 Soviet war drama The Cranes Are Flying. Weinberg wrote 59 other film scores and more than 150 opus numbers altogether in every possible genre. But for many years, he was overshadowed by other, more famous Soviet composers: Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian.
No longer. Especially since the centenary of his birth in 2019, Weinberg’s music has moved into the international repertoire. His powerful opera The Passenger, completed in 1968 but not premiered until 2006, has been regularly revived on prestigious stages and recorded multiple times by major labels.
The three Weinberg works for string orchestra that were energetically performed on Saturday, March 15, in a meticulously curated concert at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall are less familiar but no less worthy of attention.
Colburn’s Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices billed the program as “Music of Poland,” but that’s not the full story. Weinberg, a Jew, was born in Warsaw in 1919 but fled Poland in 1939, just ahead of the Nazis, and sought refuge in the USSR. He lived there for the rest of his life, mostly in Moscow. Trained in Soviet conservatories and mentored by Shostakovich, Weinberg was long considered to be a Soviet, or Russian, composer.
Since the collapse of the USSR three decades ago, however, the Polish musical and cultural establishment has been vigorously reclaiming Weinberg as their own. Fluent in Polish, Weinberg once said that “Poland is my homeland, but my second homeland remains Russia.” The vice consul of the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles, which underwrote Saturday’s event, stressed Weinberg’s Polish identity in brief opening remarks.
There was nothing specifically Polish about the three attractive works sparklingly performed by an orchestra of Colburn students and faculty. But Salonen Conducting Fellow Aleksandra Melaniuk, born and educated in Poland, brought an insider’s clarity and rigor to the music.
The earliest score on the program was the charming neoclassical Concertino for Violin and String Orchestra, Op. 42, dating from 1948. This was a tragic moment in Weinberg’s complicated personal life and a time when Soviet composers were being forced to write “accessible” music.
Student soloist Alena Hove found just the right combination of lightness and bite in her playing, never pushing her instrument’s tone. Expertly balanced and compact, the piece opens with a romantic, slightly angular theme that recalls the start of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto. That lyrical mood prevails throughout, except for a surprising digression into a jagged solo cadenza at the outset of Weinberg’s second movement. In the third movement, one hears echoes of waltzes from Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella, completed just a few years earlier. The Concertino is Weinberg at his best, a work sure to be heard more often in the future — and all the more amazing considering that when he wrote it, his very life was in danger from Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges.
Another neoclassical work, the Concerto for Flute and String Orchestra, Op. 75, from 1961 — a period when formerly banned Western music was becoming better known in the USSR — shows some influence of Stravinsky in its carnivalesque rhythms, awkward leaps, and jocular tone. Student soloist Martha Chan coolly and gracefully handled the jumping octaves, tricky cross-rhythms, abrupt key changes, and high-velocity double-tonguing in the third movement’s rustic, klezmer-inflected dance.
The thorny Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 145, from 1987, one of Weinberg’s last compositions, is an arrangement of his 1940 String Quartet No. 2. Melaniuk managed to bring cohesion to what is a somewhat meandering work, solemn, austere, and with frequent episodes of dense polyphony, plus another one of those off-kilter waltzes that show up frequently in Weinberg’s music.
Ironically, by the time Weinberg died in 1996, Russian music had moved on to an eclectic, avant-garde postmodernism as practiced by such composers as Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Edison Denisov. Works like the Chamber Symphony No. 1 seemed almost old-fashioned. But the contemporary case for Weinberg shows how everything old becomes new again.
