Gabriel Chmura reviews
'The most gifted young Polish musicians... master all the technical difficulties of these two scores' by Prokofiev and Weinberg
The harmonic and textural adventurousness of Weinberg’s powerful Fifth Symphony is indicative of the changing cultural climate in the Soviet Union during the early 1960s. A large-scale four-movement work that moves from a restless opening Allegro moderato and a gloomy Adagio sostenuto to a grotesque Scherzo and an elegiac and emotionally ambiguous Andantino Finale, this is hardly a conventional Socialist Realist symphonic narrative.