A symphony concert on the 100th anniversary of Mieczysław Wajnberg's birth will take place on 23 November 2019 at 6:00 p.m. at the Warsaw Philharmonic.
Written eighty years ago, Dmitry Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6 is one of the most original pieces in this genre in the composer’s oeuvre. It is also one of the shortest. It lasts a mere half an hour and, similarly to the Second, the Third and subsequently the Ninth, it is blessed with an unusual architecture: a huge Largo followed by two fast movements: Allegro and Presto. The political situation was not conducive to a positive reception of the piece, and Shostakovich was accused of not being sufficiently “committed”. After all, the author of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had announced that he was working on a grand thanksgiving symphony in honour of Lenin, featuring solo singers and a choir, but of course, he never wrote it. Instead, he composed a monumental fresco in the spirit of Mahler with an almost vulgar and only superficially optimistic finale seemingly artificially tagged on to the end.
In the year that Shostakovich completed his Symphony No. 6, twenty-year-old Mieczysław Weinberg graduated in piano from the Warsaw Conservatoire and started composing his first pieces. It was then that he began his flight to the east – first to Minsk and then to Tashkent (where he met Dmitry Shostakovich) and finally to Moscow in 1943, where he settled for good. Of the dozen works he produced for solo instrument and orchestra, it is his Violin Concerto from 1960 that has recently won an influential group of admirers headed by Gidon Kremer keen to promote it in the concert world. One truly indefatigable champion of Weinberg’s music in Poland is Gabriel Chmura, who at this special concert will conduct the four-movement Sinfonietta No. 1 from 1948, a work suffused with Jewish folklore.
Piotr Maculewicz
More information at: http://www.filharmonia.pl/koncerty-i-bilety/repertuar/koncert-symfoniczny227