Mieczysław Weinberg - String Quartets Vol. 2 (Quatuor Danel)

Information

Composer: Mieczysław Weinberg

• (01) String Quartet No. 7 in C major, Op. 59
• (04) String Quartet No. 11 in F major, Op. 89
• (08) String Quartet No. 13, Op. 118, in one movement

Quatuor Danel
Marc Danel, violin
Gilles Millet, violin
Vlad Bogdanas, viola
Guy Danel, cello

Date: 2008
Label: cpo

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Review

The Quatuor Danel continues its assignment to record the complete string quartets of Weinberg for CPO. It’s something they have so far managed with assurance and a complete appreciation of the idioms involved. Volume 2 presents quartets nos. 7, 11 and 13, three works spanning two decades.

No 7 shares a Beethoven Rasumovsky quartet opus number, Op. 59. It was written in 1957. It opens slowly and highly expressively, reminiscent of Shostakovich’s First Quartet perhaps – the name is obviously unavoidable when discussing Weinberg. There are rather formalized klezmer themes in the central movement, and they flicker and fleck the music’s texture, in a way that is mesmerically insistent. The third movement is the longest and it takes us back to the opening before unleashing a powerful set of variations. The writing here is alternately terse and brittle, with an urgent, thrumming galvanising the rhythmic basis of it. But there are also pizzicato and lyrical moments too, at least until the concluding and powerful Adagio section ends it.

Nine years later Weinberg wrote his Eleventh quartet. What impresses here is the sheer clarity of the writing, its rhythmically pointed character and the Shostakovich-influenced sense of colour and thematic writing. It’s in the Allegretto that Weinberg unleashes some remarkable muted passages, fugitive and furtive; totally intriguing. Withdrawn and still the slow movement prefaces the ambiguous quietude of the finale, with its interrogative interplay. This is a fascinating work, brilliantly played.

The Op.118 quartet is the shortest, and is cast in one movement. The vague melancholy of its opening gives way to a demarcated scherzo section around 4:00 in this recording. The strong sawing unison figures are exciting whilst the expressive temperature remains terse. The brittle gestures may be reflective of the fact that Shostakovich had died the previous year. It’s certainly not a threnody, more a brusque, unsettled rejoinder.

The recorded sound in the Cologne studio has been well gauged: it’s not too chilly, but its clarity doesn’t preclude warmth. David Fanning’s notes are excellent.

-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

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Mieczysław Weinberg (8 December 1919 in Warsaw – 26 February 1996 in Moscow) was a Soviet composer of Polish-Jewish origin. From 1939 he lived in the Soviet Union and Russia and lost most of his family in the Holocaust. He left a large body of work that included twenty-two symphonies and seventeen string quartets. Weinberg's works frequently have a strong programmatic element. Throughout his life, he continually referred back to his formative years in Warsaw and to the war. Although he never formally studied with Shostakovich, the older composer had an obvious influence on Weinberg's music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mieczys%C5%82aw_Weinberg

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Quatuor Danel is a French string quartet which was founded in June 1991. The quartet trained under the guidance of the Amadeus Quartet, the Borodin Quartet, Feodor Druzhinin of the Beethoven Quartet, and also with Pierre Penassou and Walter Levin of the LaSalle Quartet. The Danel Quartet's repertoire includes classical as well as contemporary music. They are specialized in the Russian repertoire; they have recorded the quartets by Shostakovich and Weinberg (world premiere). Since 2005, the Danel Quartet is "quartet in residence" at the University of Manchester, and since 2016, at Tivoli Vredenburg Utrecht.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatuor_Danel
http://www.quatuordanel.eu/

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