Mieczysław Weinberg - String Quartets Vol. 5 (Quatuor Danel)

Information

Composer: Mieczysław Weinberg

• (01) String Quartet No. 1 in C major, Op. 2
• (04) String Quartet No. 3 in D minor, Op. 14
• (07) String Quartet No. 10 in A minor, Op. 85
• (11) Capriccio, Op. 11
• (12) Aria, Op. 9

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

Date: 2011
Label: cpo

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Review

Volume 5 of the Danel Quartet’s Weinberg project

When reviewing the Danels’ first two instalments (3/08, 2/09), I was as impressed by their preparation and absorption in Weinberg’s idiom, and Arnd Coppers’s fine sound, as I was by the music itself. Encountering the fifth disc (only Quartets Nos 2, 12 and 17 remain, by my reckoning), I can confirm that there has been no fall-off in quality. The sound is beautifully balanced, close without being overbearing, the playing a model for any aspiring quartet (try the Third’s hushed central Andante sostenuto or the delicate opening of No 10’s Scherzo).

These five pieces offer a fascinating, rarely viewed glimpse into his early output and – in the extensively revised First Quartet – how he might have developed had the Second World War not forced him from his native Poland. Weinberg’s First (1937) stands apart from the rest of the series in several ways, for instance in Szymanowski’s benign influence – most clearly heard in the central Andante tranquillo – and in its thoroughgoing recomposition in the 1980s in which the experienced quartet composer slickened up his first attempt. The brief Aria (1942) and playful Capriccio (1943) are also products of his pre-Shostakovich period, written in Tashkent before the move to Moscow.

It is in the Third that we fully encounter the familiar Weinberg, not least in its unusual formal design with its opening Presto bursting at the seams and closing, hushed Allegretto musing on its single theme (the work was recast and reordered many years later as the Second Chamber Symphony). The Tenth (1964) is the real masterpiece, though, a four-span-in-one design that is wholly satisfying structurally and expressively without the whimsical designs of some of its successors. Another excellent disc.

-- Guy Rickards, Gramophone

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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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