![]() It’s a retro near-masterpiece of 1930s rhythms and neo-classical riffs. The listener dare not relax.Ī 1948 concertino for violin and string orchestra is altogether more ingratiating, with an arresting opening melody and busy interplay between soloist and ensemble. Written under Stalin’s second Terror Wave in which members of Weinberg’s family were murdered, the works wear a fixed smile and a ferocious concentration. Skip that, and you enter a frisky 1950 string trio, followed by a 1949 violin-piano sonatina in which the pianist is the irresistible Tchaikovsky winner, Daniil Trifonov. ![]() He opens this set with a solo violin sonata, austere and melancholic. Gidon Kremer has no doubts of his genius. Some consider him the third great Soviet composer, after Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But a revival has been stirring these past few years with European and US productions of his Auschwitz survivors’ opera The Passenger and sporadic recordings of variable quality of his instrumental works, among them 27 symphonies. Living in the shadow of his close friend and neighbour Dmitri Shostakovich, the Polish refugee was little known in his lifetime (1919-1996) outside Soviet Russia. This page contain Norman Lebrecht's CDs of the Week from Februto March 4, 2014.
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