Mieczysław Weinberg
Weinberg’s String Trio Op. 48 will be performed live at Plum Street Temple on June 2nd, 2024. Read more about Weinberg below.
About the performance:
Soli Music Society and the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices join forces for a special musical collaboration, presented in partnership with Isaac M. Wise Temple. Violinists Evin Blomberg and Adam Millstein, violist Gabriel Napoli, and cellist Ilya Finkelshteyn will perform a program curated by guest artist Adam Millstein that highlights music by composers whose lives and careers were tragically cut short by the Nazi regime in Europe. This powerful program honors three important composers—Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Erwin Schulhoff and Mieczysław Weinberg—whose works have been revived through recent performances and have now become significant contributions to the world of music.
Mieczysław Weinberg (1919 - 1996)
Though less well known, a strong case can be made that Weinberg stands beside Prokofiev and Shostakovich in the Russian pantheon in much the same way Brahms found his place beside Bach and Beethoven in the German pantheon. By birth Polish and Jewish, he fled the Nazi Blitzkrieg in 1939, barely surviving a horrific escape into the Soviet Union. Already recognized as a budding composer, he entered the Minsk Conservatory and studied composition before relocating to Moscow. There, his prolific output led to a lifelong friendship with Shostakovich. For the rest of his life, the Shoah shaped Weinberg’s music—subtle but tough, modern but accessible, interweaving warmth and lyricism with melancholy and spiritual yearning, frequently driven by Jewish folk themes. By the time he died in 1996, he had composed 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets, 8 violin sonatas, 6 piano sonatas, 7 operas and more than 40 film scores. It wasn’t until the collapse of the Soviet Union that his music began filtering out to the rest of the world.
String Trio, Op 48 (1950)
The lighthearted opening doesn’t last, soon interrupted by dark foreboding. The happy mood returns, but now shadowed with unease. The two themes repeat, merge, separate and finally collide. A frantic section follows, like fleeing for your life, then the music holds its breath, profoundly suppressed, until a folk dance takes over, celebratory if it weren’t for the looming threat. The tragic second movement is Hamlet in A Major— lyrically gorgeous, melancholy, a questioning soliloquy of hopeless wishing, a musical prayer ending with total surrender. The forward looking third movement opens with a hopeful theme on viola, joined by cello. And again the whirling Jewish folk dance, Weinberg’s spiritual determination to reconcile the irrationality of the world. Opus 48 ends with pizzicato from the viola, like the ticking of a clock, followed by one last chord from the three instruments in a single utterance, a final sigh of resignation.
Notes written by Bill Haxton