Trio Voce

Shostakovich - Weinberg

Gramophone Magazine, May 2011

Trios from two musical bedfellows beautifully captured in Chicago

by Laurence Vittes

The big winner here is Mieczyslaw Weinberg, whose wartime masterpiece, composed in 1943, has a more profound belief in the strength of structure and formality than Shostakovich’s Opus 67 which instead rails against the absurdity of structural formalism in tones of both outrageous self-parody and frightful intensity.

Born in Poland, Weinberg first fled to Minsk then to Tashkent. He moved to Moscow thanks to Shostakovich, to whom he had sent his first Symphony. They both were devoted to Bach and each became uniquely their master’s alter ego.

Weinberg’s Trio, beginning with a heraldic opening recalling Brahms in an unexpected way, is fractured by violent cataclysms that make survival a matter of will. The power of its lyric energy is surprisingly soft but monotone, like being ravished by Garbo’s Ninotchka. It is music of the night, hard fought, tonal in large part, vividly narrative and only occasionally lit up by flares. It is the music of a man above whose head flew the flag of Josef Stalin, not the National Endowment for the Arts.

The University of Alberta-based Trio Voce play every bar of the Weinberg for everything it’s worth, which sometimes means a sort of clunky methodical gait with lots of bow laid on the strings (great double-stops from violinist Jasmine Lin). They approach the Shostakovich Trios with equally straightforward, sturdy appetite and the result in Opus 67 is rich in rustic peasant gaits and attitude. Meanwhile, every chord and each slide and glissando is captured by Bill Maylone’s crack crew working at WFMT in Chicago.