Weinberg

»This man was completely underestimated for many years, almost forgotten; for a long time, I myself was under the biased impression that he was just a second-rate version of Shostakovich … he had a voice of his very own«, says violinist Gidon Kremer about the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg, whose oeuvre he passionately endorsed. Weinberg’s works, and his Piano Trio op. 24 in specific (written shortly before the end of the war), reflect the traumatic experience of loss, war and the Holocaust. »I see it as my moral duty to write about the war«, said the composer.

»After this piece, I feel as though I had read a grand, tragic story!« This statement could very well be in reference to Weinberg’s trio, though the words are in fact Clara Schumann’s spot-on description of Johannes Brahms’s piano quintet. This piece marks the glorious ending of Brahms’s first period of composing chamber music and, in our programme, serves as valid counterpart to Weinberg’s piano trio.