Mieczysław Weinberg, Kremerata Baltica, Gidon Kremer

Mieczysław Weinberg was born in Warsaw in 1919 and died in Moscow in 1996, in semi-obscurity. Dmitri Shostakovich, one of his supporters, considered him among the great composers of the age. This double album with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica works as a portrait, moving from solo violin through chamber music to the string orchestra. Its five works span three decades, from the Concertino Op. 42 of 1948 to the Third Violin Sonata of 1979.

Kremer is the soloist in the unaccompanied Sonata No. 3 and in the Concertino, and leads the orchestra as concertmaster in the Tenth Symphony. In the Trio Op. 48 he is joined by violist Daniil Grishin and cellist Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė, and in the Sonatina Op. 46 by the pianist Daniil Trifonov. The recordings were made in November 2012 and July 2013 at Neuhardenberg in Germany and at Lockenhaus in Austria, where the Sonata and the Sonatina were taped. Manfred Eicher produced the album, with Peter Laenger and Stephan Schellmann as engineers.

The Third Sonata, dedicated to the memory of Weinberg's father, unfolds in a single span of more than 22 minutes. The Sonatina of 1949 and the Trio of 1950 have three movements each and draw on a late-romantic language. Cookson heard bitter melancholy in the Trio's slow movement and something of a klezmer fiddler in its folk-inspired finale. The Concertino for violin and strings is graceful and lyrical. The Symphony No. 10 for string orchestra of 1968 was commissioned by Rudolf Barshai and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra and is dedicated to them. Its five movements, from Concerto grosso to Inversion, set twelve-tone rows against chordal writing.

In BBC Music Magazine in 2014, Erik Levi heard “a stunning performance of the Third Sonata for unaccompanied violin” and found it the strongest work on the set. He called the symphony a fascinating piece, played with great brilliance. Michael Cookson of MusicWeb International described the symphony in 2015 as “daring and comparatively progressive” and counted the release among the finest Weinberg recordings available.

Double CD on ECM New Series, ECM New Series 2368/69, first released in February 2014.