Mieczysław Weinberg - Symphony No. 8 'Polish Flowers' (Antoni Wit)

Information

Composer: Mieczysław Weinberg

• Symphony No. 8 'Polish Flowers', Op. 83

Rafał Bartmiński, tenor
Magdalena Dobrowolska, soprano
Ewa Marciniec, alto

Warsaw Philharmonic Choir & Orchestra
Antoni Wit, conductor

Date: 2013
Label: Naxos
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.572873

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Review

Weinberg’s chilling pictures of Poland from Wit in Warsaw

In 1964 Weinberg produced a follow-up to his Sixth Symphony that displays an even more sharply focused social conscience. The Eighth sets 10 poems by his favourite Polish author, Julian Tuwim, dealing first with the poverty of pre-war Poland, then with the devastation of the country at the hands of the Nazis. The texts and Weinberg’s settings of them amount to a prolonged cry of outrage, though one that ends by gently affirming what the composer called ‘the victory of freedom, justice and humanism’. For one who himself had escaped on foot from Warsaw in 1939, losing his parents and sister in the process and living the rest of his life in exile, the poems could hardly have touched a rawer nerve.

The musical style he adopts is resolutely non-complaisant, which is to say several degrees more challenging than that of the Sixth Symphony. In place of the boys’ choir are adult voices, including three soloists, and the orchestral palette is for long stretches gun-metal grey (the two pianos and xylophones in the seventh setting, ‘Warsaw Dogs’, are notably confrontational). Gone is any trace of folk-like intonations; instead the musical language is more than halfway to the ultra-austerity of the Requiem that Weinberg would begin composing the following year. The Shostakovich influence is also less apparent, unless it be from the most inscrutable pages of his Babiy Yar Symphony. Only with two lugubrious quotations from Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ Sonata is there any easily read level programmaticism, and there is none of the comparative glamour of Penderecki’s oratorical mode. Not an easy listen, then. Still, patient attention is rewarded, however, when the second half of the work springs into denunciatory life and when the later movements unobtrusively tie threads together from the first half.

Apart from the Polish Radio performance conducted by Gabriel Chmura in 2000 that has had some limited private circulation, Naxos here offers the premiere recording. Antoni Wit conducts a thoroughly well-prepared account, with respectable solo and choral singing. Phrasing and overall dramatic shaping are perhaps a little stiff, not surprisingly given the demands of some of the writing. It’s a pity that Naxos cannot run to giving us texts and translations in the booklet, since the poems are the running thread around which Weinberg weaves his challenging, intermittently beautiful music.

-- David Fanning, Gramophone

More reviews:
ClassicsToday  ARTISTIC QUALITY: 9 / SOUND QUALITY: 9
BBC Music Magazine  PERFORMANCE: **** / RECORDING: *****
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2013/Jan13/Weinberg_sy8_8572873.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2013/Feb13/Weinberg_sy8_8572873.htm
http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Name/Magdalena-Dobrowolska/Performer/275882-2
https://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.572873&languageid=EN
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Weinberg-Symphony-No-Polish-Flowers/dp/B00ARL9OVS

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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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Antoni Wit (born February 7, 1944 in Kraków) is a Polish conductor. He studied with Henryk Czyż, Krzysztof Penderecki and Nadia Boulanger. He has recorded over 90 albums, most of them for the Naxos label, and many of them with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice, of which he managed and was artistic director from 1983 to 2000. Since year 2002 he has been music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. Wit specializes in the works of Polish composers such as Henryk Gorecki, Witold Lutosławski, Karol Szymanowski and Krzysztof Penderecki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Wit

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