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Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Daybreak — Symphony No.12 (Chandos)
★★★★☆/★☆☆☆☆
In Dmitri Shostakovich’s final years, Mieczyslaw Weinberg stopped writing symphonies. After his eleventh in 1970, nothing extra stirred in him till, in December 1975, 4 months after his buddy’s passing, he started a memorial symphony.
The twelfth didn’t go effectively. The influential conductor Kirill Kondrashin rejected the overlong opening motion and the hour-long rating didn’t get a listening to till Maxim Shostakovich, son of the dedicatee, carried out a Soviet radio broadcast in October 1979. Quickly after, Maxim fled to the West and the symphony was left to collect mud.
What we hear is a chronicle of gratitude and ambivalence, a tapestry of Shostakovich quotations riddled with ironies, contradictions and regrets. The early moments are tentative, as if Weinberg is questioning whether or not he can obtain one other work on this scale. As confidence grows, so does independence. There isn’t a lack of Shostakovich bombast, however there are additionally has three quiet contemplations of arresting themes, every extra sombre and lovelier than the final. A marimba at the beginning of the finale is a typical Shostakovich gesture of mockery — life is futile, however who cares? The ending is left, fairly intentionally, unresolved.
Weinberg and Shostakovich have been all the time the primary to see one another’s new work. Weinberg may have written this symphony with Shostakovich’s rasping voice in his ear, supportive, skeptical, and self-censoring. On third listening to, I preserve discovering extra traces of a mutually sustaining relationship. This can be a really invaluable exhumation of a little-known work of nice historic second, dazzlingly carried out by the BBC Philharmonic and its chief conductor John Storgards.
The much less I write of the 1957 symphonic poem Daybreak, the higher. Composed for the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Daybreak has fragments of revolutionary anthems chasing one another across the orchestra to no apparent function, besides to fulfill the childish minds of Social gathering ideologues. Such have been the issues Soviet composers needed to do to outlive.
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Norman Lebrecht is without doubt one of the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s a daily presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Road Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
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