North Norfolk Music Festival

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Mieczysław Weinberg's String Quartet No.5 from 1945 will be performed by the brilliant Karski Quartet on Thursday 14th August at 4pm as part of the North Norfolk Music Festival.

​The programme will also include a World Premiere of a new composition by Simon Rowland Jones who has written this information about Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg. 

Now, you may not have heard of Mieczysław Weinberg, but he was a close friend of Dmitri Shostakovich (the 50th anniversary of whose death we mark at NNMF this year) and we felt it would be a good idea to include one work by Weinberg to help his fine music, on the surface not dissimilar to that of Shostakovich, see the light of day! A few words about this interesting composer, and please take the time to listen to each of the short clips from the 5th String Quartet as you read.
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Mieczysław Weinberg (December 8, 1919 – February 26, 1996) was a Polish, Soviet, and Russian composer and pianist. Born in Warsaw to parents who worked in the Yiddish theatre in Poland, his early years were surrounded by music. Listen to this passage from the 5th quartet's HUMORESKA 
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He taught himself to play the piano at a young age and eventually became skilled enough to substitute for his father as a conductor at Warsaw's Jewish Theatre. At the age of 12, he started formal music lessons and soon thereafter enrolled at the Warsaw Conservatory. But as the Wehrmacht advanced on Warsaw in 1939, Weinberg left his parents behind and fled with his sister towards the Soviet border. Discomfort forced his sister to turn back in mid-journey—he never saw her or the rest of his family again. 

Changes in Soviet cultural policy in the postwar led to increased repression against minority groups, including Jews. This led to the murder of Weinberg's father-in-law on the orders of Stalin in 1948. Although Weinberg's music was praised by critics and colleagues—including Khrennikov, general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers—and continued to be played, he was surveilled and harassed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. On February 6, 1953, Weinberg was arrested; he was jailed at Lubyanka Prison, but intercession on his behalf by Shostakovich led to Weinberg's release on April 25. Listen to the beginning of the 5th quartet's SCHERZO. For the next few years, he focused his efforts on music for film and stage. By the end of the 1950s, he turned his attention again to concert music. He experienced his greatest professional success in the 1960s, when his music was played by musicians such as Rudolf Barshai, Mstislav Rostropovich and the Borodin Quartet.  Here is a serene passage from the 5th quartet's MELODIA. 

Weinberg continued to compose prolifically through the 1980s, but Crohn's disease and the collapse of the Soviet Union had immediate adverse consequences for him and his output. The loss of state patronage and healthcare prevented him from receiving treatment for his broken hip in late 1992, which left him homebound, and eventually bedridden. Belated recognition of his music outside of Russia began in the 1990s through the advocacy of Tommy Persson, a Swedish judge. In 1994, Poland awarded Weinberg the Meritorius Activist of Culture. After consultations with his wife in late 1995, he converted to Orthodox Christianity a few weeks before his death on February 26, 1996.

Alongside Weinberg's colourful 5th quartet will also be Beethoven's String Quartet in A, Op.18 No.5, also a rather colourful work, and the premiere of Simon Rowland-Jones's new quartet, part one of a projected series of seven quartets collectively entitled 'From Beginning To End', a sort of musical autobiography. 
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