National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra Katowice

Weinberg Symphonies – No 14; No 16
Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra
Gabriel Chmura
Chandos CHAN 10334 (64' • DDD)

Deeply probing works that confirm their composer as a true heir of Shostakovich. This third volume of Gabriel Chmura's Weinberg cycle features two single-movement symphonies from the years after Shostakovich's death. Each one is out of the top drawer. The Sixteenth (1982) is laid out as a sonata-form movement, beginning with an unmistakable tribute to the declamatory opening movement of Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. It unfolds as an anti-Introduction, losing energy and drive until a punchily contrapuntal first subject (passing affinities with Tippett) pulls the symphony's socks up, and eventually gives way to a recall of the opening. Glimpses of lyrical possibilities in the woodwind are confirmed when the oboe leads off a "second subject", marked by ethnic touches in the accompaniment and inspiring uneasy reflectiveness, of which mood Weinberg was a past master. In reaction, a severe development ensues, with a tense climax and a balancing recapitulation equally strong in inevitability and unpredictability. The end is breathtaking: a kind of neo-Mahlerian desolation that clearly needed to be expressed and to which no one else was giving effective voice at the time.This, then, is not a symphony that seeks to grab headlines in the garish experimental manner of Schnittke and other Soviet contemporaries; its probing quality and its ability to sustain long arcs of thought over and above disruptive surfaces place Weinberg far ahead of his post-Shostakovich compatriots as an artistic voice for his troubled times.The Fourteenth Symphony (1977) falls into four movements but shuffled from their textbook traditional disposition. A troubled Largo comes first, followed by a burlesque quasi-Scherzo that forces folklike motifs to negotiate polymetric obstacles and other disruptive influences in a way that is both virtuosic and absorbing. Next comes a long, rhapsodic Adagio, a bizarre kind of chamber cadenza that raises far more questions than it answers and ends in utter dejection. At which point many a lesser composer would have left things. But Weinberg supplies a five-minute Moderato that somehow combines the role of finale with "missing first movement". Here and in the Sixteenth, the Polish orchestra do their conductor, themselves and Weinberg proud. An issue of considerable accomplishment and importance.

David Fanning