Weinberg's history

Elena Schwarz

Unlike tonight’s solo cellist, Swiss-Australian conductor Elena Schwarz (b. 1985) does not come from a family of musicians; her parents are doctors. “That’s why I’ve tried to be involved in places that are less privileged than where I grew up,” she says. She makes her debut with the HPO tonight, though Finnish audiences may remember her as the winner of the second prize in the 2015 Jorma Panula Competition. She had already won the first prize in the Princess Astrid Competition in Norway, and would later be accepted for the Fellowship programme of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra led by Gustavo Dudamel. Appearances have followed with prestigious orchestras across the world, in Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Australia and the USA.

Schwarz’s repertoire knows no bounds. She is equally at home with Brahms as she is with Boulez, yet she is perhaps best known as a conductor of contemporary music, having specialised in this during her studies at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland. She also studied musicology and the cello in Geneva before taking up conducting and has experience of opera, too.

Alban Gerhardt

“The calm authority and probing insight that Alban Gerhardt brings to his performances make him one of the finest cellists around,” wrote The Guardian in 2011. He has been the soloist with practically all the world’s great orchestras, so listing them is pointless, yet he has also even performed on German local trains.

“When I was four years old,” says the son of a coloratura mother and violinist father, “my Dad tried to make me play the violin – an experiment that failed miserably not only with me but with all my four younger siblings. Frustrated by our father’s perfect command of his instrument, all of us got started with the piano, which I still think is the best way to “meet” music in practice. And one day, my mother asked me if I was interested in playing another instrument besides the piano, and ‘how about the cello?’” A mere ten years later, Gerhardt was the soloist with a chamber orchestra at the Berlin Philharmonie, and in 1991 with the Philharmonic.

Gerhardt also feels it is his duty to help those in need, by offering a home to an Afghan refugee, for example, and by performing in schools, hospitals and youth institutions. He plays a Matteo Gofriller cello from 1710.

Vito Žuraj: Api-danza macabra

Where have all the insects gone? The bee population has plummeted; 40% of bee species are already endangered, yet without them, our crops will not grow. We can do all sorts of amazing things like flying to the moon, but as far as Nature is concerned, we humans are just a nuisance. When Westdeutsche Rundfunk asked Slovenian Vito Žuraj (b. 1979) to compose a short work for orchestra as part of a series of ‘contemporary miniatures’, he wrote Api-danza macabra lasting just under six minutes about the bees’ dance of death. It was premiered in Cologne in 2021. Žuraj not only bewails the busy bees’ demise; he also misses the soundscape they create. We cannot imagine a flowering summer meadow without their steady hum in the background. Api-danza macabra is both descriptive and abstract. It begins with zest, as swarms of insects flit hither and thither from flower to flower. The violins use pencils instead of bows, and the winds only their instruments’ mouthpieces. The percussions predict disaster. Will we grasp what is happening before it is too late to do anything about it?

Mieczysław Weinberg: Cello Concerto, Op. 43

Mieczysław Weinberg (1918–1996) was a Polish Jew and had just completed his studies when, in autumn 1939, Germany attacked his country and he fled to the Soviet Union. This may seem a strange choice, but he had no alternative. Left at home, his family was soon murdered. He then proceeded to Tashkent, where for once he had a stroke of luck when his first symphony fell into the hands of Dmitri Shostakovich, who managed to get permission for him to travel to Moscow. The two would become life-long friends. But life under Stalin was not easy. In 1953, Weinberg was even sent to prison on charges of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” with a death sentence hanging over him. He was only saved by the intervention of Shostakovich, whose own fate hung by only a thread.

Weinberg composed a wide range of music, including 26 symphonies and 14 string quartets, and everything from dodecaphonic avant-garde to theatre and circus music, but not until this century has his star really been rising, long after his death. He wrote his four-movement Cello Concerto in 1956.

Bohuslav Martinů: Symphony No. 1

Beginning his career as a violinist, Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) left his native Bohemia for Paris in the early 1920s, just as the city’s musical life was beginning to flourish again after WWI. He wrote in a style that goes loosely under the heading ‘Neoclassical’, but that applied to almost all music at the time that was not blatantly avant-garde or romantic. His music was well received in France, but he did not become Frenchified, and in 1940 he sought refuge from fascism in the USA; because although he was not a Jew, the Nazis occupying France had forbidden performances of his music. He soon gained a firm foothold in his new homeland. In 1942, by now over 50 years old, he was a prolific composer but had never composed a symphony until commissioned to do so by Sergei Koussevitzky. From 1942 onwards, he proceeded to write five symphonies at the rate of one a year, and the first was premiered towards the end of 1942. His symphonic debut was already a convincing one. As he was writing the third movement, Largo, news reached him of the Nazi’s Lidice massacre in Czechoslovakia, and the Largo is said to be a monument to that atrocity.