Weinberg - String Quartets 5 & 6, Improvisation & Romance | CD Accord ACD298

Weinberg - String Quartets 5 & 6, Improvisation & Romance

£17.05

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

Label: CD Accord

Cat No: ACD298

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Chamber

Release Date: 2nd December 2022

Contents

About

String Quartet no.5 was written in the autumn of 1945 and was performed on 17 May 1947 in Moscow by the Beethoven Quartet, to whom it was dedicated. Years later, Weinberg returned to this Quartet and arranged it for orchestra as the four-movement Chamber Symphony no.3, op.151 (performed on 18 November 1991). It was several years before that he had first begun to turn to his scores from almost half a century earlier, and he already had 17 string quartets under his belt. It was also then that he arranged his String Quartets no.2 and no.3 as Chamber Symphonies no.1 and no.2, and in the summer of 1987 that he confided to a friend: “I’m looking through the baggage of my youth. Sometimes I find something in there that is worth rethinking.”

Initially, the String Quartet no.6 had a promising reception. However, the Sixth Quartet proved to be an unlucky work for Weinberg, and it was probably not until 24 January 2007 in Manchester that the piece was heard by an audience for the first time, performed by Quatuor Danel.

Weinberg briefly returned to quartet format in the autumn of 1950 when he wrote his Improvisation and Romance (Adagio – Andante). The first ever performance of Improvisation and Romance that we know of only took place in 2018 (Quatuor Danel, Lucerne). Featured in this album, the piece is not only related in its character to String Quartet no.5 but it also crowns Mieczysław Weinberg’s complete string quartets recorded by the Silesian Quartet – like an unpretentious encore after a successful concert.

Error on this page? Let us know here

Need more information on this product? Click here