If you put this disc on blind, you might be forgiven for thinking that the opening group of songs was by Shostakovich. It has the same spiky energy and angular melodic outlines. In fact, they were written by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a Polish Jew, and weren’t in Russian at all. The songs originally set poems of a Polish Jewish poet, Itzhok Lejb Perez, who wrote in Polish and Yiddish. When they were first published in Russia in 1944-45 (the late Stalinist period), they were published in Russian translation and someone called the set Children’s Songs. In fact there is very little that is childish about either the poems or the music but no-one in Stalin’s Russia was going to call them Jewish Songs.

Weinberg was born in Warsaw and fled the Nazi occupation in 1939. First of all he ended up in Belarussia where, in Minsk he studied with a pupil of Rimsky Korsakov. The Nazi invasion of the USSR forced a further flight to Uzbekistan whence he was invited to Moscow by Shostakovich, who had heard his First Symphony. Weinberg lived in Moscow from 1946 until his death in 1996. Although never officially one of Shostakovich’s pupils, his contacts with the master were very close.

Weinberg composed some thirty song cycles and this is volume 1 in Toccata Classics planned complete Weinberg song edition. It should reach an impressive number of volumes when it reaches completion.

Weinberg opens the Children’s Songs, Op. 13 with a wordless Introduction from singer and pianist, this introduces the following four songs which are all relatively light-hearted and carefree; delightful depictions of children’s lives, full of Jewish folk inflections. But at the opening of the next song the mood changes immediately. This one, Grief, is the child’s anguished and puzzled response to a family and home destroyed by war. Weinberg rounds this off with a Coda which repeats the material from the Introduction but this time in a far sadder tone - a lament for the land of lost content.

I would have liked to hear these songs in their original language, but Olga Kalugina’s account of them in Russian is everything it should be. Kalugina has a bright, attractive rather Slavic-sounding voice which seems entirely appropriate to this music. For the Introduction and first four songs she is perfectly in folk mood and in the final song her plangent intensity is profoundly moving. Her upper voice takes on a rather narrow focus when under pressure. The result is not unappealing and rather distinctive though it might not appeal to everyone. As with most Slavic voices, Kalugina has quite a pronounced vibrato but it is not overly intrusive. The core of her voice is solid. She displays a good sense of line when needed but has a lively feel for the rhythmic nature of some of the songs.

Beyond the Border of Past Days, Op. 50, was written in 1951, between the 1948 anti-formalist campaign and Weinberg’s arrest in 1953. Shostakovich wrote to Beria (the head of the secret police) on Weinberg’s behalf and Weinberg was released later in 1953 but did not recover his composing equilibrium until 1957. These songs are amongst the few that Weinberg seems to have written without worrying about official disapproval. The songs set poems by Alexander Blok (1880–1921) a major poet of the late Tsarist and early Bolshevik period. Blok was a Romantic with Symbolist leanings. The opening poem expresses religious exaltation and the remaining songs are all some sort of allegory of redemption - dealing with pain, solace, what has passed and what remains.

Weinberg’s settings are rather more sober than the poetry might imply. They are sung here by mezzo-soprano Svetlana Nikolayeva who imbues them with a rich darkness and a feeling of Russian fatalism. Nikolayeva has a dark mezzo-soprano voice. Like Kalugina she has a strong vibrato around a very firm core of voice. You never feel that you are in danger of losing the essential melodic line as you can with some such voices.

Though these songs are still in Shostakovich’s aura, there is a melancholy darkness which is new. They seem to lack the satiric spikiness that is a characteristic of Shostakovich. Sixteen years after composing these songs Weinberg was in fact the pianist in the first performance of Shostakovich’s Blok Romances, Op. 127.

The final group of songs were written in 1973, two year’s before Shostakovich’s death. The song cycle sets poems by Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957), the Chilean poet and educator. Mistral was a supporter of the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War and so was ideologically acceptable in the Soviet Union. These are all lullabies and Weinberg introduces a rocking motion in the first song - this continues throughout the cycle. We seem a long way from late Shostakovich here.

The vocal line is smooth and melodic and Weinberg’s harmonic language has developed a new fluidity and obliqueness. The poems are not entirely straightforward. They touch on implied social comment and the adult’s need for comfort. Weinberg’s settings accept this, never making the songs quite the simple lullabies that they could be.

Kalugina is equally at home in these late Weinberg songs and her account, often understated, can be quite poignant. In all three song-cycles, the singers are ably accompanied by Dmitry Korostelyov. Weinberg was a pianist himself and Korostelyov seems remarkably unphased by any of the demands that Weinberg makes of him.

This is a fine start to Toccata’s Weinberg series. Weinberg’s music deserves to be better known and this disc should win many converts for his alternative view of Soviet modernism.

Musicweb International, Robert Hugill
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2008/Oct08/Weinberg_TOCC0078.htm

When the Nazis presented their infamous exhibition of "degenerate music" in Dusseldorf in 1938, documenting all the composers who had been proscribed as well as the musicians who performed them, they also organised a parallel series of concerts in the city devoted to works by composers who had received official approval. The first to be heard was Richard Strauss's opera Arabella, and that was followed a night later by Hans Pfitzner's "romantic cantata" Von Deutscher Seele, a giant orchestral song cycle-like setting of poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. Strauss may have been a naively apolitical figure, but Pfitzner was a self-confessed antisemite and a long-standing and public supporter of the Nazis, who craved to be adopted by the Third Reich as its standard-bearing composer, and he stuck to his fascist beliefs even after 1945. All of which makes it hard now to take a dispassionate view of this strangely powerful work, which had been well-received on its first performance in 1922, and was repeated in New York the following year. This fascinating recording, taken from performances given by Ingo Metzmacher in Berlin last year, which themselves aroused considerable controversy in the city, only reinforces the paradox. For on purely musical terms there is no doubt that Von Deutscher Seele (Of the German Soul) is one of Pfitzner's most convincing works, and one that in some ways belies both his reputation and his own writings as an arch musical as well as political conservative. Though the work remains rooted in late 19th-century romanticism, a number of the composers whom Pfitzner had condemned are echoed in aspects of the cantata, including Mahler and Debussy and even Schoenberg, whose Gurrelieder could have been the formal model for Von Deutscher Seele's sequence of vocal settings articulated by tumultuous orchestral interludes.

The two halves of the cantata - called Man and Nature, and Life and Singing respectively - create a symmetrical arch-like structure, and Metzmacher's performance, with an outstanding quartet of soloists and superb choral singing, leaves no doubt of the coherence of that whole. It's an intensely serious, dark-hued work which taken on its own terms (if that is at all possible) is a powerfully impressive achievement.

The Guardian, Andrew Clements
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/sep/19/classicalmusicandopera

This has been an astonishing time for Beethoven lovers, and particularly for fans of the Seventh Symphony, what with excellent recent releases from Paavo Järvi (RCA) and Ivan Fischer (Channel Classics). Now Osmo Vänskä weighs in, completing his already outstanding Beethoven cycle with what may be the best version of them all. It has all of Järvi's vitality, rhythmic edge, and transparency of texture, and it supplies in abundance the one element missing from Fischer's version: sharply etched bass lines. This is a critical factor at such points as the first movement's recapitulation, with its galloping lower strings, or the codas of the outer movements. Indeed, I'll bet you've never heard the cellos and basses grinding away more powerfully at the conclusion of the finale. The effect is beyond thrilling, and it's all the more so for being exactly what Beethoven's markings prescribe.

As you can already see, Vänskä's Seventh has one of the prerequisites for a great performance: unique interpretive details that no one else matches, at least to quite the same degree. I could cite many more: the characterful (but never mannered) accentuation of the Allegretto's principal theme; the witty articulation of the scherzo, proving that "Presto" is as much an expressive indication as it is a measure of sheer speed; the same movement's ideal tempo for the always problematic trio; the amazingly varied and crystal clear presentation of the first movement's various dotted rhythms; and a finale whose volcanic energy and sense of "power barely leashed" is perhaps matched only by Toscanini's famous New York Philharmonic recording. Again, here is a classic case of maximum excitement generated less by playing fast than by forceful accents and incredible ensemble discipline.

In this last respect, it's impossible to over-praise the Minnesota Orchestra's horns, woodwinds, and especially its strings, whose ensemble work matches the best of anything out there today, including Järvi's amazing Deutsche Kammerorchester Bremen. Even tremolos and normally perfunctory accompanimental figures tingle with life and energy. This also makes Vänskä's take on the Second Symphony equally special, though no additional details are necessary. These two performances are all of a piece. The coupling with the Seventh turns out to be inspired, as the works have much in common: the vivid woodwind scoring, the lengthy first-movement introductions, and the sheer masculinity of the tuttis. Of course they have appeared on disc before, but in these renditions we really can hear both the similarities as well as Beethoven's stylistic growth from one symphony to the next. Brilliantly engineered, utterly natural sonics in all formats provide the finishing touch on a Beethoven cycle that stands with Barenboim's as a modern reference edition, and that features a Seventh that just may top them all.

Classics Today, David Hurwitz
http://www.classicstoday.com/review.asp?ReviewNum=11864

The six singer of Nordic Voices are classically trained and experienced in overtone singing and microtonality. Here they premiere six works written for them and Kare Kolberg’s Plym-Plym, which features a profusion of musical styles set to the writing on the disc, the highlights being the solo organ works – the Toccata from the Mass for a Saint’s Day in particular – and the organ accompaniments that underpin quintessentially English choral parts.

Goldberg Early Music Magazine, William Yeoman