Mieczyslaw Weinberg (Polish: Wajnberg) wrote his first string quartet in May 1937.
(...)In the summer of 1941, Weinberg was forced to flee for a second time. On this occasion, he made his way to Tashkent, to where members of the Leningrad Conservatory were also evacuated in the autumn. In December, he had an opportunity to hear his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 3 performed by these exiled musicians. Afterwards, the work probably ended up in a drawer and was shown only to composer-friends, which would explain the similarity between this piece and certain episodes from Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartets Nos. 2 and 6, written at a later period when both composers maintained close contact. Forty-five years later, Weinberg returned to the material of his youth. Using the experience he had gained over the past decades, he made certain alterations. He changed very little in the first two movements: he made a few abbreviations, developed certain themes in a slightly different way, and added variety to others by complementing existing parts with new ones; sometimes he also changed the articulation or register. He then added a new movement in the form of a short delicate intermezzo (largely through playing con sordino and the abundance of rests between the short motifs). Relatively speaking, he made the most changes to the existing finale. And it is this new version of String Quartet No. 2, this time assigned opus number 145, that the Silesian Quartet performs on this disc.
(...)
At the end of September 1943, the fugitive from Warsaw settled in Moscow. It was not his first stay in Moscow, as he had been there earlier, in 1940, as a delegate from Minsk for an event called the Decade of Belarusian Art. It was there that he met Nikolai Myaskovsky, regarded as a leading figure in the Moscow composer community, and on his return to Moscow he naturally immediately renewed that acquaintance. Soon, he also found himself in frequent contact with Shostakovich, who had moved permanently to Moscow a few months earlier (Leningrad was still under siege). Weinberg was admitted to the Composers’ Union, which was a very important step, as it opened up opportunities for performing and publishing his new works. In February 1944, he began work on his first “Moscow” piece, String Quartet No. 3, Op. 14. At the time, this was a popular genre among Soviet composers – string quartets were being penned both by older composers, including Myaskovsky, and members of the younger generation, such as Yuri Levitin, a friend of Weinberg. These new scores quickly found willing performers among the many excellent musicians based in Moscow at the time.
(...)
The Bolshoi Theatre Quartet performed String Quartet No. 4, which was dedicated to the ensemble, on 19 January 1946. In 1959, the work appeared in print as Weinberg’s first published quartet, and four years later it was discussed by Lev Raaben in a monograph on Soviet chamber music. In keeping with the trend of the time, what he primarily heard in the piece were the echoes of war. The two opening movements were intended to reflect the enemy invasion and a heroic mood. The funeral march in the third movement seemed obvious given the programme of the work, and the finale was interpreted by Raabe as a reminiscence of a carefree childhood, although most listeners tend to associate it with the beginning of Mendelssohn’s Octet; we do not know whether this was deliberate or accidental. Twelve years later, Ludmila Nikitina interpreted the Quartet differently. Above all else, she was struck by the echoes of Jewish music recognisable in the second movement. Her sensitive ear proved to be closer to the composer’s own intentions, as years later Weinberg used this very movement in his Symphony No. 21, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto, entitled Kaddish, which means a prayer for the dead.
Danuta Gwizdalanka

ACD 291 Track10 Wajnberg String Quartet No  4 Op  20 - III  Largo Marciale

ACD331 - Track 06 - Lukaszewski - Missa Sancti Papae Ioannis Pauli Secundi Magni - Sanctus

ACD331 - Track 01 - Lukaszewski - Terra Nova Et Caelum Novum

ACD 331 - Track 11 - Lukaszewski - Corpus Christi Responsoria - Homo Quidam

Most of us, when contemplating medieval representations of danse macabre, in which Death leads people of all walks of life, do not pay attention to the sound aspect of the allegory. Yet it is very important – where there is dancing, there must also be music.
In the oldest depictions, dating back to the end of the Middle Ages, it is Death that plays an instrument. Interestingly, it is a wind instrument, such as a flute or bagpipes, or a percussion instrument. In the Middle Ages, such instruments were associated with the devil (the violin is a quite modern attribute in this context). Knowledge of this association has allowed art historians to understand the genealogy of the popular motif. The similarity of the contemporary images of death and the devil (whose domain included such bodily activities as dancing) explains the didactic function of the famous allegory, which appeared in Europe after the plague epidemic in the 14th century.
In the context of numerous painted representations and literary texts of this period, the collection of old musical records referring to the dance of death is relatively modest. Nineteenth-century works such as Totentanz by Ferenc Liszt and Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns have little in common with the classical shape of allegory. Only the times of modernism and the development of historical art sciences meant that composers, exploring old techniques, directly referred to preserved medieval representations. The composers’ imagination was most influenced by paintings from Basel and Lübeck. The Swiss Totentanz inspired Arthur Honegger (La danse des morts) and Frank Martin (Ein Totentanz zu Basel im Jahre 1943), while Hugo Distler paid tribute to the north German one in his work Totentanz, Op. 12 No. 2. (...)
In the well-known motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen, Op. 74 No. 1 by Johannes Brahms from 1877, the issue of the continuity of German culture plays an important role. The composer used the music of his unfinished youth project Missa canonica (in which he explored Renaissance contrapuntal techniques) to pose fundamental existential questions. Brahms left some clues on how to interpret this compelling piece. He pointed out, among other things, that it was related to his melancholic disposition. Taking up the genre of a religious motet is interesting because the composer, baptised in the Protestant church, often ironised about religion, and his worldview can best be described as humanistic. (...)
O Tod, wie bitter bist du from Geistliche Gesänge, Op. 110 is Reger’s voice in final matters. The composition is believed to have been created in just five hours in 1912 and was dedicated to the recently deceased youngest daughter of another Leipzig master, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The text of the motet comes from the Ecclesiasticus, and its spirit teaches the same difficult moral as the dance of death and asks the same questions as Brahms’ Job. Reger, though, highlights the contrast between a human who prospers and a human facing death in a different way. In one of his letters he wrote about this work: ‘it will be a terribly sad work, ending with a transformation – that is: Death is the end that transforms.’ (...)
There is one more piece on this album – Sarabande from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita in A minor for solo flute, BWV 1013. It will sound like the lament of Death itself on the ruins of the Lübeck church. For 19th-century German culture, Bach was both the ideal of a romantic artist and at the same time a religious craftsman. The culture founded on similar contradictions gave birth to masterpieces of musical literature, but also to the criminal ideology of Nazism. Each of the above-mentioned composers wanted to equal Bach, and it was Bach who was perceived as a proof of the German people’s superiority. Yet, like them, he was just another human in Death’s procession. 

Szymon Atys
Translated by Anna Marks

ACD 291 Track10 Wajnberg String Quartet No 4 Op 20 - III Largo Marciale

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