Uncovering a midcentury musical treasure trove
Telegraph Quartet mines the work of composer who escaped Nazis
One of the fascinating musical subplots of the past decade or two has been the gradual exploration and rediscovery of the music of the Polish-born Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who fled the Nazis only to wind up in the extremely limited safety of Stalinist Russia. There’s a story yet to be told here about the intersection of politics, ethnicity and musical style, and a little of it came through during a fine recital on Sunday, Dec. 9, by the Bay Area’s own Telegraph Quartet.
Weinberg died in 1996 at 76, leaving behind an enormous body of work — nearly two dozen symphonies, 17 string quartets, several operas and massive amounts of chamber music. Some of it was never performed during his lifetime; even more was premiered and then forgotten.
Increasingly, though, it becomes clear that Weinberg’s music, with its elusive blend of modernist dissonance, mournful expressivity and Jewish strains, has plenty to add to the musical repertoire. It may take some winnowing, but the task is already under way — the
Houston Grand Opera gave an acclaimed U.S. premiere to Weinberg’s opera “The Passenger” in 2014, and the young French ensemble Quatuor Danel has been busily curating the string quartets.
Weinberg’s String Quartet No. 6, which occupied the second half of the Telegraph’s program presented in Herbst Theatre by San Francisco Performances, is among the fruit of that effort. The piece was written in 1946, but wasn’t performed until the Danel gave it a posthumous premiere in 2007, and for all its oddities it definitely deserves to be better known — or indeed known at all.
Running just over 30 minutes, the quartet is in six movements of widely varying length and character; not even Shostakovich, whose music is sometimes held up as an influence on Weinberg, shaped his work in such quirky dimensions. There’s an expansive, moody fugal rhapsody at the heart of the quartet, and an opening movement that flits unpredictably in and out of clear harmonic centers.
In between lie a pair of brisk scherzos that can’t seem to decide whether or not to be separate movements; like some kind of musical conjoined twins, they share thematic bloodlines while retaining their own identities. And in the finale, Weinberg overlays a keening violin solo with a Yiddish tinge atop dense, heavy string chords that don’t seem obviously related to it.
The piece teeters wonderfully on the brink of ingratiating charm, only to pull back into more rough-hewn rhetoric at a moment’s notice. As it happens, that’s where the Telegraph Quartet — violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin and cellist Jeremiah Shaw — does its best work, mustering a meaty ensemble sound that can be ferocious or rhapsodic as needed.
Those qualities turned up in force during the opening account of “Five Pieces for String Quartet” by Erwin Schulhoff, another victim of the Nazis who perished in 1942. This collection of short movements, premiered in 1924, are like a modernist catalog of dance rhythms perceived through a fun-house mirror — a Viennese waltz à la Bartók, a sinuous, offbeat tango, a hyperactively whirling tarantella.
The ensemble gave this a ferocious and alert performance, and followed with Dvorák’s String Quartet in E-Flat, Op. 51. There was nothing to object to there, but a quartet that is such an ardent champion of the undiscovered seemed to be biding its time with such traditional fare.
Weinberg’s music, with its elusive blend of modernist dissonance, mournful expressivity and Jewish strains, has plenty to add to the musical repertoire.