Very early in my exploration of classical music I discovered an LP recording of one of Vainberg’s Sinfoniettas and enjoyed listening to it, so I have been aware of him as long as I have many other better known composers.

Vainberg’s music is sort of like Shostakovich with some sugar on it, or perhaps one should say a little less vinegar — the same drama, melody, and colour but with less depression and sarcasm. This is remarkable because Vainberg has more to be depressed and angry about than Shostakovich. Vainberg’s entire family in Poland was destroyed by the Nazis, and Vainberg himself came much closer to being sent to the gulag than Shostakovich ever did — saved, ironically, by Shostakovich’s intervention on his behalf. Vainberg has a fine sense of drama and structure. As he is every bit as capable an orchestrator as Shostakovich, his music has rich orchestral colour. Chandos’s usual demonstration quality sound is put to very good use here and the artists perform brilliantly and with great sympathy.

Unfortunately, it is precisely this relative lack of angst that sets Vainberg’s music on a slightly lower pedestal than Shostakovich. At his best — the Violin Concerto Op. 67 or the Fourth Symphony — he is very, very good. Those works have hummable melodies, traditional structure, and exciting drama and can be recommended without reservation.

The Fifth Symphony is a stark, urgent, passionate work, with only fragmentary themes here and there. Orchestration and dramatic structure are very reminiscent of Shostakovich. Both the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies are more melodic, or at least more recognisably motivic, certainly more fun. The Sinfonia, described in the notes as "Jewish music," is a tuneful work with bright rhythms and cheerful colour. It deserves to be much more popular than it is. So, unless you are a Vainberg completist (come on, I’m sure I’m not the only one out there) you might be more likely to buy this disk for the Serenade. If the future volumes in this Chandos "Symphonies" series, which evidently will also include all the Serenades, are as well performed and recorded as this one, Vainberg completists will rejoice in each new volume.

On this disk the publisher has used the polyglot form "Mieczyslaw Weinberg" and "Weinberg" is on the disk spine. On Olympia OCD472 the name is "Moishei Vainberg" but other of the Olympia series have it as "Miechyslav Vainberg." and one sometimes sees "Mois(s)ei." One could get the idea we’re talking about a whole crowd of people.

Paul Shoemaker

Mieczslaw Weinberg (more frequently seen in the Russian variant as Moise Vainberg - or ‘Vaynberg’ if you look at the 1980 New Grove) was born in Warsaw, the son of a violinist and composer working in the Polish theatre. In 1941, a fateful year, he moved to the USSR, at first to Minsk, then to Tashkent. His First Symphony resulted in an invitation to Moscow by Shostakovich. The two became close and had a relationship of mutual trust and friendship under which they shared views on draft compositions and supported each other through the most testing of times. Vainberg was in fatal peril in 1953 when his name became linked with a campaign to make a Jewish state out of the Crimea. Shostakovich's intervention saved him from the gulags or a bullet in the back of the head.

The Fifth Symphony has not previously been recorded. The work emerged in 1962 influenced by the first performance, after a long suppression, of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. It is dedicated to Kondrashin, a lifelong Vainberg champion, who conducted the premiere of the Shostakovich work and recorded it for Melodiya shortly afterwards. Alistair Wightman comments, in his notes, on the similarities between the music of Shostakovich and Vainberg. The four movement Symphony is indeed bleak, has its moments of soured triumph threaded through with disillusion. There is a beleaguered comfort about the fine tenderly plangent adagio sostenuto which is I think more powerful than anything in Shostakovich 4. It bridges across to the tense adagios of the Roy Harris symphonies of the 1930s and 1940s. Tension bursts the bonds at 9.01 when the tender theme thrusts forward with all the torque of a supercharged spiritual; impressive by anyone's reckoning. The impishly playful flute and then other solo wind instruments seem to dance in macabre delicacy in the shortish allegro. This soon takes on a distinctly Shostakovichian edginess and dazzle before restively petering out into silence from which emerges attacca a pastoral finale. This becomes increasingly impassioned in the raucous style of Markevitch and Mossolov at one point (5.54). All in all this is a deeply serious symphony which hardly ever drops its guard.

There are twenty two symphonies, two sinfoniettas, seventeen string quartets, seven operas and much else. The First of the two Sinfoniettas is included. It is in four compact movements. Scorchingly knockabout uproar, steppe pomp, Armenian lyricism (tr.6 1.56) and Yiddish character (e.g. the clarinet solo in the allegretto) are the order of the day. Both material and treatment are more instantly accessible than in the much later symphony. Surprisingly the French Horn solo that initiates the Lento is played with all the liquid Slavonic style we have come to expect from the heyday of Soviet orchestras under Mravinsky, Ivanov and Golovanov.

Olympia have done a superb job of making many hours of Vainberg available. I rather hope that Chandos will think of filling the gaps left in the symphony cycle by Olympia rather than duplicating their work.

Due to the work of Claves, Russian Disc and Olympia there is now or has been quite a lot of Vainberg in the catalogue although so much of it depends on Olympia. Chandos are set to make a major and enduring contribution if this disc is anything to go by. Don't let this one slip into the background and don’t imagine that Vainberg is some second league Shostakovich. He has his own perspective and his motivating sharpness, invective, Russian passion and desolation are distinctively his own.

A classic entry. Don't miss it if you have a taste for tragic symphonic statements.

Rob Barnett