Polish-born Weinberg had a terrible family history due to persecution by the Nazi during the war and the later anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, where he had moved to escape the Nazi. He was a close friend of Shostakovich – they showed one another all their new scores. He was a prolific composer who wrote 26 symphonies and 17 string quartets among many other works, and he got frequent performances in the Soviet Union. The four-movement Fourth Symphony opens with a sonata-form Toccata with an energetic theme. The third movement is an intermezzo and in the finale, which quotes both Polish and Russian folk songs, there is a strong Bartok influence.
The Second Symphony’s initial movement also has Bartokian qualities. The instrumentation is for strings and timpani. Its last movement is an orchestral transcription of a song from a song cycle by Weinberg, “Remembrance.” I find the composer’s Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes to be the hit of this disc. In a style reminiscent of Borodin – the work certainly doesn’t sound like a composition of 1949 – it plays around elegantly with some folk-sounding themes. The interesting aspect here is that Weinberg chose the title of the piece to disguise the fact that the folk material, though it had Moldavian roots, came mainly from the Jewish population of that region.
– John Sunier
