Working amidst political and personal setbacks, Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–96) flourished as a composer, admired by Shostakovich and championed by the leading Soviet musicians of the day. His death in Moscow in 1996, however, went largely unnoticed. More happily, his extensive catalogue has recently secured an increasing number of performances and recordings, witness this Naxos release of his complete music for cello and orchestra, works written largely during the earlier part of his maturity. Raymond Bisha introduces the Cello Concertino, the Cello Concerto, and the Fantasia for Cello and Orchestra.

This podcast is also available on YouTube.

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Catalogue No.: 8.574679

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(This podcast was first published on 30 January 2015)

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Catalogue No.: GP698-701

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View album details
Catalogue No.: GP698-701

The post Podcast: Weinberg’s comprehensive keyboard catalogue. appeared first on The Naxos Blog.

Compositions that are descriptive of an occasion or an object are referred to as ‘programmatic’; works that stand on their own, without external references, are classified as ‘absolute’. This month’s list of new releases has examples of both types, so I’ve chosen a few from each by way of an introduction to both the music, and the programmatic/absolute concept.

First, we have Chang Ping’s Oriental Wash Painting, a suite of four concertos, each featuring a different traditional Chinese solo instrument: guzheng (Chinese zither), erhu (Chinese violin), pipa (Chinese lute) and zhudi (Chinese bamboo flute). The first movement is titled The Wind Washed Clouds and is scored for guzheng and orchestra.

In discussing the work, Chinese musicologist Li Jiti has explained how the idea came from a classical Chinese poem, My Cottage Unroofed by Autumn Gales, written by Du Fu, a famous poet from the Tang Dynasty. The poem reads: “Shortly the gale subsides and clouds turn dark as ink; The autumn skies are shrouded and in darkness sink.” Chang Ping was struck by these two lines, which gave him the inspiration to create the concerto. A number of images came to his mind on reading the poem: the gale had just passed away, the cloud was as dark as ink, and the rainstorm was about to come. He then immediately turned these images into notes, just like a painter’s decisive sweep and stroke on a canvas, or a Chinese calligrapher splashing ink on paper without hesitation. Here’s the first part of the concerto.

The Wind Washed Clouds (8.570627)

A much more gentle scene is depicted in Bruce Paine’s Oakura Chimes for solo guitar; Paine is one of New Zealand’s leading composers for the instrument. In January, 2018, he spent a week with Yvonne Blatti, mother of one of the organisers of the Taranaki Classical Guitar Festival held at Oakura, a small township located on New Zealand’s North Island. Here he found inspiration for a new work in a set of wind chimes hanging by the back door of the house where he was staying, which spurred him to try and tune the guitar as closely as possible to the same notes. The composer has written an introduction to Oakura Chimes:

“The opening section of the piece is intended to give an impression of the chimes gently moving in the breeze. This evolves into melodic material occasionally interspersed with wind chime arpeggios (natural harmonics). Overall the piece is meant to depict the peaceful Oakura garden setting which included rabbits, quails, and other bird life. During my stay with Yvonne, I learned of her affection for defenceless animals and disgust at the way many are treated, such as poisoning and the destruction of habitats. She does her best to care for those that frequent her garden and neighbouring fields. She also pointed out new monarch butterflies flexing their wings and preparing to fly and how she was careful to protect the chrysalises in order to give them the best chance to fully develop. In the music I have arpeggios in harmonics that slowly ascend then later descend to represent a butterfly opening and closing its wings. This evolves into the butterfly’s first flight represented by rapid arpeggios. After the flight there is a recapitulation of the opening melodic material and a transition to material similar to the ‘chimesesque’ introduction.”

Oakura Chimes (8.574121)

As a young man, the German composer Max Reger (1873-1916) already felt a close affinity with the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901). Reger dubbed the variation movement of his String Quartet, Op. 74 Der geigende Eremit (‘The Hermit Fiddler’) in allusion to Böcklin’s painting, originally titled Der Einsiedler (‘The Recluse’). For Reger, it encapsulated the symbolic ideal of the musician who could concentrate exclusively on his vocation, far from worldly distractions. Böcklin and Reger both made death a central and lifelong theme of their work, looking it squarely in the eye: their motto was “as long as I paint (or compose), I am alive”.

In Reger’s Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin, the sequence of ‘four orchestral mood pictures’ corresponds to the movements of a symphony distinguished on the one hand by their different instrumental scoring, but at the same time interlinked by thematic connections.

The turbulent Vivace finale was inspired by Böcklin’s Bacchantenfest (Bacchanal). Reger himself considered it “incomparable in its savagery, frenzy and Dionysian spirits”, and one commentator thought that at the end it seemed as though “the gods themselves were hopelessly intoxicated”. As you listen to the piece, you may well think that Reger used a more orgiastic lens than Böcklin to draw the image.

Bacchantenfest (8.574074)

Finally, and far more gentle on the ear, is William Perry’s Toujours Provence that comprises four snapshots of Provence, the region in France that Perry has often visited, thoroughly embracing the history and culture of this picturesque part of the world.

The first part of the work is titled A Brief History which whisks the listener’s imagination down the centuries through musical interludes in different historic styles. The opening music is marked ’From a Distant Past’ and begins in the low strings before gradually working its way up through the woodwinds to a solo piano entrance and a ‘Welcome to Provence’ theme. It summons the spirit and beauty of Provence from the earliest days of settlement. A solo trumpet and then full brass announces ‘The Arrival of the Romans’. After some elaboration, the music moves to the High Middle Ages where woodwinds and light percussion suggest the period of ‘courtly love’. The piano picks up the theme for a modern presentation. The last historical reference comes with the piccolo trumpet presenting La Carmagnole, a melody widely sung and danced to during the French Revolution.

A Brief History (8.573954)

Now to four examples of absolute music from this month’s new releases. The first two, by Beethoven, are from the turn of the 19th century, when audiences would have been mentally responding not to any programmatic content of a composition, but to its form. Sonata form, rondo, theme and variations, for example, were used so frequently that listeners would have been aware of what was around the next corner, and responsive to occasions when a composer delivered the unexpected!

Any rondo was built on a simple plan: a main theme, stated at the start of the movement, that alternates with contrasting themes. A typical plan might be: A-B-A-C-A-D-A.

Here’s the finale of Beethoven’s Sextet in E flat major, Op. 71, scored for pairs of clarinets, horns and bassoons. Does the rondo’s structure reflect the suggestion given above?

Sextet in E flat major (8.573942)

Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto was published 5 years later, in 1801. The finale of many concertos at the time was cast in rondo form, and this concerto is no exception. Can you detect if the suggested plan is repeated here? or if it is slightly different?

Second Piano Concerto (8.574151)

Our next example is by Carl Czerny, a pupil and lifelong friend of Beethoven. His Andantino and Rondo for piano and orchestra was published six years after Beethoven’s death, in 1833, but still draws on the rondo form for its high jinks finale.

Andantino and Rondo (8.573998)

Finally, to a concerto written more than a century later, in 1961. It’s the Flute Concerto No. 1 by the Polish-born Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg. Its finale isn’t cast in rondo form, but presents two themes that are duly repeated to emphasize their contrast. Attention is sustained through Weinberg’s skilful contrasts in melody, rhythm, texture and timbre. An ‘absolute’ joy!

Flute Concerto No. 1 (8.573931)

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I’m referring to the 1871 London version of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem). He began work on the original score with orchestral accompaniment in 1865; the first performance wasn’t given until 18 February 1869, in Leipzig.

Two years later, Ein deutsches Requiem was first performed in Britain. This time, the format was not a grand concert with large chorus and orchestra. Instead, the performance took place in a private home on Wimpole Street, in central London. It featured a choir of around 30 voices, a solo soprano and baritone, and a piano duet for accompaniment (which was a discreet doctoring of Brahms’ version of the work for piano duet alone). The work received its first public performance in Britain in 1873, when it was sung in English. Our new recording conveys a good idea of how those private and public performances would have sounded. Here’s an extract from the second section: For mortal flesh is as the grass.

For mortal flesh is as the grass (8.573952)

The practice of arranging large-scale works for piano, as exemplified just now by Brahms, is seen again in the next work – Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1, written in 1841 and arranged for piano four-hands by Clara and Robert Schumann, a version that was published the following year. In an age before sound recording was possible, arrangements, initially for solo piano, offered the only way to get to know, play and hear the substance of large-scale works. Here’s part of the third movement of the Schumanns’ arrangement of Robert’s First Symphony.

Symphony No. 1 (8.551415)

The number of players in a chamber ensemble is usually in single digits. A symphony orchestra (or philharmonic orchestra) will have a hundred players, or more. A chamber orchestra, sometimes called a sinfonietta, will employ a fraction of that number. Smaller can be beautiful in a number of respects, even though a chamber orchestra can’t produce the dynamic punch of its big brother. We can listen to an extract from the Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1986) by the Polish-born Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg. It had true chamber roots in that it was derived from a string quartet he had written way back in 1940. Here’s the vivacious last movement.

Chamber Symphony No. 1 (8.574063)

We downsize and down tempo a little now with music by Giovanni Salviucci, his Chamber Symphony for 17 Instruments. Born in 1907, Salviucci was recognised as one of Italy’s most talented composers alongside Luigi Dallapiccola and Goffredo Petrassi but his early successes and all future hopes were quashed by his untimely death in 1937. The Chamber Symphony was written in 1933. The second movement is a pleasantly gentle interlude in which all the melodies and colours of individual lines can be clearly heard.

 
 
Chamber Symphony for 17 Instruments (8.574049)

 
Music for three performers is next in two pieces of music written more than three centuries apart. The first is by the 17th-century Spanish composer Juan Hidalgo. His Zagalejos del valle (Shepherds of the Valley), performed here by singer, harpsichord and double harp, is a tono humano, a form of secular song characteristic of and exclusive to the Spanish Baroque, from a period when solo accompanied songs were at their most popular. The protagonist addresses some shepherds as he wonders which is the worse fate, death or absence from one’s beloved, given that, as the refrain tells us, there is little to tell the two apart.

Zagalejos del valle (8.574092)

Across to neighbouring Portugal now and music for piano trio (violin, cello and piano) by Alexandre Delgado, who was born in 1965. He composed his Trio Camoniano in 2013, originally as a sequence of three songs, and rescored the work for piano trio in 2017, retaining the intensely lyrical quality of the original songs. The first movement depicts a lover’s lament, the third an evocation of saudade – longing. The middle movement, Erros meus, má fortuna (My mistakes, bad fortune), also concerns love gone awry, but this time the tone is resentful, placing the blame squarely on Fortune. Correspondingly, Delgado writes music that is tempestuous and which, in spite of dance-like moments, ends with an angry protest at the injustice of love.

Erros meus, má fortuna (8.574014)

We pare down to two performers now (violin and piano) in two 19th-century violin sonatas written within 30 years of each other, and in a related European style, but geographically set considerably apart.

Joseph Joachim Raff (1822–1882) was born in Switzerland. His early interest in composition became an obsession which led him to seek Mendelssohn’s opinion of his talent; he received a very positive endorsement in return. Liszt took Raff on as his amanuensis in Weimar, Germany in 1850, and his compositional output grew. He became known primarily as a symphonist; he also produced a large portfolio of piano works. But Raff’s first love was the violin and his pieces for the instrument were promoted by no less a virtuoso than Sarasate.

It wasn’t until the autumn of 1853 that Raff began to compose his first violin sonata, by which time he had already written ten other works for the instrument. His deteriorating relationship with Liszt had curtailed his activities as Liszt’s assistant sufficiently to allow him more time to devote to his own compositions. The Violin Sonata No. 1 is an ambitious composition with a generally nervous character, which may perhaps stem from Raff’s frustration with his situation in Weimar and his repeated inability to secure a post away from the city. I want to play you the second movement, marked ’Very quick and precise’. Can you synchronise with the beat with complete precision? What at first sight appears to be a standard Mendelssohnian scherzo is mischievously subverted by myriad fleeting changes of metre.

Violin Sonata No. 1 (8.573841)

Three years before that music was written, Leopoldo Miguéz was born in Brazil. He went on to receive his musical education in Spain, Portugal and France before returning with influences from Europe to a homeland in a state of enormous social upheaval. The lyrical character of Miguéz’s ambitious Violin Sonata, Op. 14, composed in 1885, is developed in a far more sophisticated and contrapuntal manner to anything previously experienced in Brazil. It helped mark an important change in the country’s chamber music, helping it to move from pieces intended largely for domestic use to works suitable for public performance in concert halls, as this extract from the first movement of the sonata demonstrates.

Violin Sonata, Op. 14 (8.574118)

Finally to a performance on solo guitar. Naxos enjoys a significant following of guitar afficionados and the label’s regular releases of recitals by winners of international guitar competitions helps to feed that appetite. We’ll finish, then, with playing by Vojin Kocić, winner of the 2018 Michele Pittaluga International Classical Guitar Competition. The music is an extract from a sonata by Antonio José (1902-1936), who was praised by Maurice Ravel as a composer who would “become the greatest Spanish musician of our century”. But José’s arrest and execution near his home city of Burgos in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War cast his music into a subsequent obscurity which has only recently been remedied. I hope you’ll enjoy listening to the last movement of his only sonata for guitar, a remarkably original and inventive work.

Guitar Sonata (8.574133)

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View album details of Mieczysław Weinberg’s Complete Piano Works at naxos.com
Catalogue No.: GP698-701

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