Quatuor Danel

CPO 777 566-2

Our edition of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s complete string quartets with the Quatuor Danel continues with Vol. 5. Weinberg composed his first string quartet in Warsaw in 1937, one year before Shostakovich. He later adopted a quite critical attitude toward this early quartet and submitted it to thorough revision forty-eight years later, leaving the formal design largely unchanged and mostly working toward relaxing the texture. The traditional tonic-dominant regions of the schoolbook, traditional exposition nevertheless continue to be in evidence amid the many remaining thick chromatic overlappings. Weinberg’s third, very intensive quartet is an ambitious work in three large movements, with one going over into the next without a break. When Weinberg composed his tenth quartet, he stood on the threshold of his late style, which became just as abbreviated, elliptical, and enigmatic as that of his great friend and mentor Shostakovich.

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