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A chamber concert to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mieczysław Weinberg will take place on 15 October 2019 at 7 p.m. at the National Philharmonic.

While Mieczysław Weinberg’s symphonic music has become a regular feature of concert programmes, music lovers have only recently become aware of his chamber works, which are starting to find converts among new performers.

Besides his cycle of seventeen string quartets, Weinberg’s most interesting contribution to the chamber genre are his works for violin and piano. He wrote the latter over a period of almost fifty years – beginning with his first attempts composed while still a student in Warsaw – Three Pieces for Violin and Piano (1934) – and ending with his last Sonata No. 6, completed in 1982.

We begin to realise just how rapid and intense the creative process was for Weinberg when we listen, for example, to his Sonatas No. 1 and No. 4 for violin and piano, which will be performed in the first part of the concert. These two works were written only four years apart, and between them the artist also managed to churn out two similar sonatas, four string quartets, six song cycles, an excellent piano quintet and a plethora of other pieces! Weinberg’s expansive oeuvre also includes sonatas for solo instruments: piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass, and even bassoon. The first of his three sonatas for violin solo, a five-movement piece, was written in 1968 and thus almost concurrently with his Symphony No. 8 “Polish Flowers”.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s unfinished Sonata for violin and piano from 1945 constitutes an interesting complement to the concert programme and a real treat for admirers of his music. After listening to this intriguing five-minute-long fragment, it is hard not to feel a tinge of regret that the author of the Leningrad Symphony abandoned this project.

Piotr Maculewicz

Information on tickets at: http://www.filharmonia.pl/