Arcadia Quartet give a first-rate performance in Weinberg: String Quartets

It was in 2010 that Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s name came prominently to notice again, when his opera The Passenger was staged by the Bregenz Festival. Since then, there has been a slow but determined revival of much of this too-long neglected composer’s music.

There is plenty of it to rediscover. Weinberg was prolific, writing seven operas, 22 symphonies (the conductor Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla has become a champion) and a large corpus of chamber music, of which this latest disc of three string quartets offers a fascinating sample.

Given the political upheavals in central Europe in the mid-20th century, it is amazing he managed to write so much. Weinberg was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1919, fled to Russia at the outbreak of war, was arrested on a charge of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” in 1953 but reprieved by Stalin’s death, and survived until 1996.

These three quartets have been chosen from three radically different periods of Weinberg’s life. The String Quartet No. 1 is a teenage piece, dating from 1937, though much refined later, and has a Bartok-like feel, at once troubling and consoling. The String Quartet No. 7, from 1957, adds up to a powerful personal statement, sounding like Shostakovich, with whom Weinberg was friendly. The String Quartet No. 11, finished in 1966, is entirely original, quizzical, restless, spectral, as if there are ghosts dancing.

The performances by the Arcadia Quartet are first-rate, giving a wide-ranging overview of Weinberg’s progress as a composer.

★★★★☆

‘Weinberg: String Quartets Vol 2’ is released by Chandos