ESO to Perform Midwestern Premiere of Weinberg’s Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes

The Evanston Symphony will kick off its 2014-15 season performing the Midwestern premiere of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes. The concert, featuring three 20th century Russian masterpieces, will be held 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 26 at Pick-Staiger Hall in Evanston.

After decades of obscurity, Weinberg is increasingly being recognized as one of the outstanding composers of the second half of the twentieth century. He has been called one of the three greatest Russian composers of the Soviet era, along with Prokofiev (whose masterful Fifth Symphony is also on the program) and Shostakovich, who was a close friend and mentor.

Weinberg wrote seven operas, 26 symphonies and 17 string quartets. The 13-minute Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes from 1949 is a dramatic, folk-infused and tuneful piece. It may also have been a conciliatory gesture to the Soviet music authorities, who at the time were demanding that Russian composers incorporate native folk elements into their music.

Weinberg was born in 1919 to a Jewish family in Warsaw. His father was a conductor and composer for the Yiddish theater. At the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Weinberg fled to the Soviet Union, but his parents and younger sister remained behind and perished in a Nazi concentration camp. Throughout Weinberg’s career in the USSR he struggled with official indifference, critical neglect and state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. His father-in-law, Solomon Mikhoels, the famed Russian actor and director, was murdered by the regime and Weinberg himself spent several months in prison, a victim of Stalin’s infamous Doctors’ Plot. There were times Weinberg could make a living only by composing for the theatre and the circus. He died, an obscure figure in the music world, in 1996.

A 2006 Moscow staging of his opera, The Passenger, about a chance encounter of a Holocaust survivor and her Nazi overseer, helped bring about an international revival of and interest in Weinberg’s music. It will be performed in February and March 2015 by Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Also on the ESO program, along with Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, is Rachmaninoff’s masterly Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Piano soloist will be Kate Liu, winner of the Horowitz Foundation's 2010 New York International Piano Competition. Ticket information is available at www.evanstonsymphony.org or by calling 847-864-8804.