Weinberg Piano Works, 1951-56: Piano Sonatina; Partita; Piano Sonatas Nos 4 & 5 Stefan Irmer (piano) MDG MDG91822836 (CD/SACD) 78:22 mins
The early 1950s proved to be a particularly difficult period for Mieczysław Weinberg. Having escaped from his native Poland to the Soviet Union during World War II and suffered immense trauma from leaving behind his family, who were murdered by the Nazis, he became a victim of Stalin’s increasingly paranoid antisemitism; he was even temporarily incarcerated in a Soviet jail on trumped-up charges.
His piano music from this time charts the extraordinary personal challenges Weinberg faced in walking a tightrope between writing ideologically accessible music without completely subjugating his inner feelings of melancholy and anxiety. You can hear this dichotomy manifested even in the outwardly easygoing 1951 Sonatina. Far more extreme are the ten movements that make up the Partita of 1954. We get plenty of anger and aggression, for example, in the brutal ‘March’ and the strange ‘Canon’, with its almost unplayable fast-moving octaves shared between both hands, whereas the ‘Intermezzo’ and ‘Aria’ are genteel and even fragile.
Stefan Irmer captures the Partita’s kaleidoscopic changes of mood and character most effectively. He is equally persuasive in the Fourth Sonata, achieving a delicate almost Schubertian dream-like colour in its Finale. But he’s perhaps most impressive in the relentlessly tough writing of the Fifth Sonata’s long first movement in which Weinberg builds up massive symphonic climaxes over an obsessively repeated bass line.
Erik Levi
