With violinist Gidon Kremer as artist-in-residence, it was inevitable that music by Mieczysław Weinberg would feature in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s current season. Kremer has tirelessly championed the works of the Polish-born Soviet composer, and he was the presiding eminence at a weekend devoted to Weinberg’s music, in which the highlight was the first British performance of his last completed symphony, the 21st. The CBSO combined forces with Kremer’s own chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica for the premiere, which was conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, who followed it with the final symphony by Weinberg’s close friend and mentor Shostakovich, his 15th, sounding as elusive and enigmatic as ever in this finely sculpted performance.
Completed in 1991, five years before his death, Weinberg’s 21st Symphony is dedicated to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto, and carries the subtitle “Kaddish”. It is not a setting of the Jewish prayer for the dead, but a 55-minute, single-movement elegy in six sections, studded with quotations from Weinberg’s own music and that of other composers. Its language recalls the expressionist Shostakovich of the 1930s. The big opening Largo is threaded through with lamenting violin solos (played here by Kremer) derived from one of Mahler’s Knaben Wunderhorn songs, and interrupted suddenly by a piano quoting the opening melody of Chopin’s G minor Ballade, which becomes a symbol of the suffering of the Polish nation.
As Gražinytė-Tyla’s superbly prepared performance so vividly demonstrated, it is a work of enormous power, by turns desolate, anguished and angry. The keening emotions only find consolation in the closing pages, when wordless treble and soprano voices (Freddie Jamison and Maria Makeeva here) call to each other across the orchestra, bringing a touch of humanity to a work that remembers a world without any.
