Mieczysław Weinberg
(c) Archiv Olga Rachalskaya
German violonist Linus Roth has long been a dedicated performer of Mieczysław Weinberg’s works. Now, to ensure that the oeuvre of this Polish-Soviet composer is made known to an even broader audience he has founded the International Mieczysław Weinberg Society. The conductor and co-initiator of the society, Thomas Sanderling, has helped gain the services of Irina Shostakovich as honorary president.
The website www.weinbergsociety.com provides information about the projects run by the Weinberg society and background knowledge about the composer, recordings of his works and sheet music publications.
“For me, Weinberg is someone with whom I can communicate when I play his music. I know so much about him and his compositions, and feel such a strong empathy with him and his music, that it almost seems like a friendship,” said Linus Roth.
The dramatic life of Mieczysław Weinberg, a Polish Jew who, as a promising 21-year-old composition student, fled Warsaw for Russia on the run from the Nazis, left a deep imprint on his music. While his family met their deaths in a concentration camp, he fled again from Minsk to Tashkent as the Germans attacked, finally being brought by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich to Moscow, where communist cultural functionaries denounced his music as “cosmopolitanism” and he was even temporarily imprisoned. Between Shostakovich and Weinberg there arose not only a close friendship, but an artistic and creative exchange that lasted right up to Shostakovich’s death. The two men also greatly admired each other. For example, Shostakovich enthusiastically said of Weinberg’s violin concerto, written in 1959: “It is a fabulous work. And I choose my words with care.” And he was deeply moved by Weinberg’s operatic works: “I will never cease to be passionate about Weinberg’s opera “The Passenger”…. It is a masterpiece, perfect in form and style.”
