Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla / Gidon Kremer / City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kremerata Baltica WEINBERG Symphonies Nos. 2 & 21

The Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla launches her new exclusive relationship with Deutsche Grammophon on 3 May 2019 with the release of an album devoted to Mieczysław Weinberg’s music. It showcases one of Weinberg’s earliest compositions, the Second Symphony for strings of 1946, and the Symphony No.21 “Kaddish”, completed in 1991, his haunting memorial to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. Kremerata Baltica perform Symphony No.2 and join the CBSO for No.21. The violin solos in the latter work are played by Gidon Kremer. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director since 2016, is convinced that listeners will be deeply affected by the composer’s works, which bear witness not only to the variety of his output but its consistently high artistic quality.

“In my opinion Weinberg’s definitely one of the most important composers of the twentieth century,” she observes. “We have an enormous amount of works by him. There are twenty-two symphonies, seventeen string quartets, seven operas, music for film and television, circus and theatre. Each of those works has an incredible ability to speak to performers, to listeners. One can only really judge after encountering those works or at least the majority of them, just how important he is as a composer.”

Echoing his own life experiences, much of Weinberg’s production reveals the influence of some of the most tragic moments in 20th-century history. Born to a Jewish family in Warsaw on 8 December 1919, Weinberg showed early musical talent as a pianist. He was forced to abandon his studies in 1939 when his country was invaded at first by the Nazis, then by Stalin’s Red Army. His mother, father and sister were murdered by the Nazis, while most of his extended family also perished in the Holocaust. He found temporary refuge in Belarus, then headed east to Tashkent when Hitler turned against the Soviet Union in 1941. Shostakovich, impressed by his younger contemporary’s First Symphony, invited him to Moscow in 1943. Weinberg lived there until his death 53 years later.

The Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer has played a central role in promoting the composer’s music. He launched the centenary celebrations this January on tour with his Kremerata Baltica ensemble, a chamber orchestra comprising outstanding young musicians from the Baltic states. When Kremer was appointed as the CBSO’s artist-in-residence for 2018-19, he and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla placed Weinberg at the heart of their programme plans. In an innovative but ultimately hugely successful move, they also decided to bring Kremerata Baltica to Birmingham last November to join forces with the CBSO for the UK premiere of Weinberg’s Symphony No.21 and for DG’s recording sessions