Silesian Quartet

Silesian Quartet – Weinberg: String Quartets Nos. 1, 16 & 17 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:07 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CD Accord

It is the spring of 1937. Musical circles in Warsaw are still abuzz with talk of the recently concluded 3 rd Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, especially as one of the main prizes that year has gone to Witold Małcużyński, an alumnus of Józef Turczyński’s class at the Warsaw Conservatoire. Alongside Małcużyński, Józef Turczyński has spent the last four years nurturing another promising student, an 18-year-old called Weinberg (Polish: Wajnberg). Known as Moses in his official papers, he is nowadays more keen to go by the name of Mieczysław. It was this name he had used when he put his name to two mazurkas penned in 1933 and dedicated to “Professor Józef Turczyński”. Following the mazurkas, Mietek – the diminutive form of this typically Polish name that years later he would insist that others call him by – composed three more miniatures for violin and piano, and another small piece for solo piano. And now, in 1937, he has decided to compose a string quartet, that is a multi-movement piece for a larger line-up.

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Silesian Quartet – Weinberg: String Quartets Nos. 2-4 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:50 minutes | 1,37 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © CD Accord

Mieczysław Weinberg (Polish: Wajnberg) wrote his first string quartet in May 1937. In autumn 1939, he made his way in dramatic circumstances to the Soviet Union, and there, exempted from military service due to poor health, he was given the chance to continue his training in composition at the Minsk Conservatory. His teacher there was 67-year-old Vasily Zolotarev, once a pupil of Mily Balakirev and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Persuaded by Professor Zolotarev, or perhaps acting on his own initiative, Weinberg began writing another string quartet on 25 November. He finished this first ‘student work’, and his second for such a line-up, on 13 March 1940. He dedicated it to his mother and sister, whose fate was unknown to him.
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Silesian Quartet – Mieczysław Wajnberg: String Quartets Nos. 5-6 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:01:25 minutes | 598 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CD Accord

String Quartet No. 5 was written in the autumn of 1945 and was performed on 17 May 1947 in Moscow by the Beethoven Quartet, to whom it was dedicated. Years later, the composer returned to this Quartet and arranged it for orchestra as the four-movement Chamber Symphony No. 3, Op. 151 (performed on 18 November 1991). It was several years before that he had first begun to turn to his scores from almost half a century earlier, and he already had 17 string quartets under his belt. It was also then that he arranged his String Quartets No. 2 and No. 3 as Chamber Symphonies No. 1 and No. 2, and in the summer of 1987 that he confided to a friend: “I’m looking through the baggage of my youth. Sometimes I find something in there that is worth rethinking.” (…)

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