Search - Vainberg, Kondrashin :: Vainberg, Volume 10: Symphony No.4 / Violin Concerto / Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes

Amusing.

David A. Hollingsworth | Washington, DC USA | 03/27/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Mieczyslaw Vainberg (1919-1996) was orginally born & raised in Poland. At the age of twelve, he studied at the Warsaw Conservatory of Music. However, he was forced to flee from Poland as his family was burnt alive by the Nazi during its invasion. The Reason: Vainberg & his family were Jewish. Vainberg settled in Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, for two years where he completed his studies at the Minsk Conservatory. When the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941, Vainberg moved to Uzbekistan. He submitted his first symphony of 1943 to Dmitri Shostakovish for his opinion. Shostakovich liked the symphony & invited Vainberg to settle in Moscow. Vainberg lived in Moscow until the time of his death, on February of 1996. He & Shistokovich remained lifelong friends & compatriots.Anti-Semitism prevailed in the USSR. His father-in-law, the most famous of Jewish actors Solomon Micheols, was killed by the Soviet's secret police. Vainberg was imprisoned for several months until his release on April of 1953, a month after Stalin's death. Being Jewish means being treated as second-class citizens in Soviet Russia. Vainberg was a free-lance composer who earned a modest living. He was popular in Russia, but hardly known elsewhere until the Recording world (thanks mostly to Olympia & Russian Disc reissues) began to take interest in his works, previously recorded by Melodiya LPs.What was amazing about Vainberg was his ability to compose music with solidity, substance, emotionism, & honesty. On occassion, he would tend to lose focus, with some works being less coherent & flowing than they should. What is guaranteed however is the accessiblity of his music which makes easy for the listeners to relate to what Vainberg was communicating (does this reminds you of Mahler, Nielsen, Shostakovich, Lyatoshintsky, Myaskovsky?)Such is the case of his symphonies, especially the Fourth, which is full of gaiety & good spirits, somethings not a commonplace with Vainberg, since he led a tragic life in a huge extent. The Violin concerto is highly a demanding &energetic piece, with the violin solo performing from start to finish with almost no breaks (sought of orchestral work with violin obbligato). It is also mark with excitment & optimism.The Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes is the most appealing the all rhapsodies I have ever heard. Fully virtuosic & with wonderful Hebrew themes, it is a rhapsody unfortunately not recorded & performed more often.Although Vainberg's Rhapsody remain the only work recorded by Svetlanov, it's the recording of pure excitement & conviction. Kondrashin on the other hand was the first important pioneer of Vainberg's works (as well as Fedoseyev later in the early to mid 1980s). As usual, Kondrashin's recordings with the Moscow Philharmonic showed total admiration & sympathy for the composer who travel so far & experienced so much that ignoring his achievements in concert halls & literature would itself be a tragedy. Recordings are important as starting points to a more comprehensive appreciation of gifted, yet neglected composers, Vainberg not excluded.Please. Buy this recording."

Unique Accent

Thomas F. Bertonneau | Oswego, NY United States | 11/19/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"After Shostakovich, who? Alfred Schnittke comes to mind, so perhaps does Konstantin Silvestrov or Giya Kancheli; but these men are, in fact, a generation-and-a-half removed from the Master, and all of them seem to avoid overt references to the Great Presence of Soviet music. Shostakovich had a younger friend and contemporary, however, with whom he shared both his dissentient ethos and his musical esthetic. I speak of Mieczyslaw (né Moses) Vainberg (1919-1996), who fled Poland just ahead of the German invasion (his family had burned alive in a synagogue torched by the SS), only to be thrown in jail as a suspect alien by Stalin's security men. On his release, he married the daughter of the prominent Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, continued composing, and succeeding in gaining both the attention and the friendship of DSCH. Among composers, DSCH had few friends as close as Vainberg, and, as Ian MacDonald has pointed out, the two composers shared a great deal, the direction of influence by no means always flowing from the elder to the younger. In one remarkable recording, available a short while ago from a label called The Classical Revelation, DSCH and Vainberg could be heard as duo-pianists in a keyboard reduction of the former's Tenth Symphony. Although Vainberg was Polish-Jewish by birth, he traced his ancestry to Moldava, and the Klezmer melos of Bessarabia is never far from the foreground in his music. The program of Vainberg's Fourth Symphony (1959), his Violin Concerto (1964), and his "Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes" (1949) makes an exceptionally fine introduction to the orchestral side of the composer's oeuvre. The "Rhapsody" ought by rights to be one of the most popular works in the modern repertory. It is superior to Enesco's two "Romanian Rhapsodies," which mine the same lode, and incorporates Romanian-Jewish-Gypsy tunes deployed so as "to bring the house down," as Dvorák said of his own "Slavonic Dances." The Fourth Symphony reveals close attention to Mahler as well as admiration for that other Mahler-devotee, DSCH. Ironic, wistful, brilliantly scored, it mocks the Socialist-Realist precepts urged coercively on Soviet composers under Stalin and still, to some extent, under Krushchev. The Violin Concerto, in four movements like the Symphony, is clearly molded after the pattern of Shostakovich's first essay in the genre (1948, premièred in 1955). The oldish Melodiya recordings have been refurbished by Olympia to sound as full and as clear as possible. These are a "must" for enthusiasts of Soviet music in the Shostakovichian ethos until newer recordings come along. (Are you listening, Klaus Heymann? Vainberg on Naxos would be a natural combination.)"