All four of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s chamber symphonies were composed in the last decade of his life, and the fourth of them was his final completed work, finished in 1992. The Chamber Symphonies Nos 1 and 2 were effectively reworkings of the second and third of his string quartets, and the first three movements of the string-only Third Chamber Symphony also derive from a quartet, the Fifth, which was originally composed in 1945. Only the finale, a rather nostalgic slow waltz that becomes more and more alienated, was newly composed for the purpose. The Fourth Chamber Symphony, though, is totally original, and rather strikingly so. It adds a clarinet and a triangle (which plays just four notes) to the strings, often using the clarinet in a concertante fashion. It’s a work studded with self-quotations – from Weinberg’s opera The Portrait; from a song cycle; and from the incidental music to a play. There’s a sense of rather acerbic defiance about it all, a final assertion of creative independence, which the Helsingborg Symphony captures very well, though the ending is distinctly downbeat.
