Mieczysław Weinberg, Kremerata Baltica, Gidon Kremer

This double album gathers the four chamber symphonies that the Polish-born Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg wrote in the last decade of his life, between 1986 and 1992. With them comes his Piano Quintet op. 18 of 1944, heard in a new arrangement for piano, string orchestra and percussion. It is the second Weinberg album by Kremerata Baltica and Gidon Kremer for ECM New Series, after a first set in 2014. For Kremer the chamber symphonies are “the most personal reflections of a great composer on his own life and his generation, like a diary of the most dramatic period of the 20th century.”

Chamber Symphonies Nos. 1-3 were recorded live at the Musikverein in Vienna on 13 June 2015. The Quintet and No. 4 were made a few days earlier, on 9 and 10 June, at the Latvian Radio studio in Riga. Kremer leads the strings as principal violin. Yulianna Avdeeva is the pianist in the Quintet, arranged by Kremer and Kremerata percussionist Andrei Pushkarev. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts No. 4, with Mate Bekavac as clarinet soloist. Manfred Eicher produced the album. The booklet has notes by Weinberg’s biographer David Fanning and a recollection of the composer by Alexander Raskatov.

The first three chamber symphonies rework string quartets written decades earlier: No. 1 draws on the Second Quartet, No. 2 on the Third, No. 3 on the Fifth. The first disc presents them in reverse order, from No. 3 down to No. 1. In The Wall Street Journal, Allan Kozinn heard an older man’s perspective laid over a youthful vision. No. 4 is new music for clarinet, triangle and strings, a single span in four linked sections. The triangle sounds only in the finale, and the third section is a lament for solo clarinet. In the Quintet arrangement the piano moves to the centre, closer to a concerto, as Eleonore Büning observed for Südwestrundfunk.

The set drew wide attention to a composer long neglected in the West. On MusicWeb International Stephen Greenbank made it a Recording of the Month in February 2017 and found the arranged Quintet “a potent listening experience”. Norman Lebrecht, writing for Musical Toronto, credited Kremer’s advocacy for lifting Weinberg out of obscurity and concluded: “Weinberg is now a must-know composer.”

This is the double CD edition, ECM New Series 2538/39, first released in January 2017, as Kremerata Baltica marked its 20th anniversary and Kremer his 70th birthday.