The musical reputation of Mieczyslaw Weinberg has been steadily on the rise, with performances of his symphonies and now a new cycle of his string quartets underway at the hands of the Arcadia Quartet. The quartets trace Weinberg's compositional development, especially in the first part of his career from which two of the three quartets here come. The String Quartet No. 2, Op. 3, was composed in Minsk in 1939 and 1940 and is a tuneful work (albeit with a nagging sense of uncertainty typical of its time) that's well suited ...
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The musical reputation of Mieczyslaw Weinberg has been steadily on the rise, with performances of his symphonies and now a new cycle of his string quartets underway at the hands of the Arcadia Quartet. The quartets trace Weinberg's compositional development, especially in the first part of his career from which two of the three quartets here come. The String Quartet No. 2, Op. 3, was composed in Minsk in 1939 and 1940 and is a tuneful work (albeit with a nagging sense of uncertainty typical of its time) that's well suited to the Arcadia's warm sound. By 1945, when he composed the String Quartet No. 5, Op. 27, Weinberg had come into the orbit of Shostakovich. What becomes clearer from many Weinberg releases is that the influence went not only from Shostakovich to Weinberg, but often, the other way around, and the Arcadia Quartet brings this out in their playing with richly melodic, melancholy lines. Their performance of the three-movement String Quartet No. 8 in C major, Op. 66, probably the best known...
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