Fantasia for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 52

Program notes

About the Work

Mieczysław Weinberg knew at first hand the history that the other two works on this programme remember. A Polish Jew from Warsaw, he fled east when Germany invaded in 1939 and spent the rest of his life in the Soviet Union, where Shostakovich became his close friend and supporter. The safety he found there was never complete. The years after 1948 were hard for every serious Soviet composer, and harder for a Jewish one as official antisemitism grew, and early in 1953 Weinberg was arrested on trumped-up charges of Zionist agitation.

The Fantasia for cello and orchestra belongs to exactly this period. He worked on it between 1951 and 1953, and the Weinberg scholar David Fanning has remarked that two years was an extraordinarily long time for a composer who usually wrote with great fluency. It sits among a group of suites, rhapsodies, sinfoniettas and concertinos in which Weinberg seems to have tried to meet halfway the official demand for a simpler, more tuneful style. The reviewer Robert Hugill, writing about a recent recording, put it another way: the idea was to play safe with folk-inspired pieces, but the result is more complex than it needed to be, as if Weinberg could not quite play the game.

The music is full of melody, and much of it sounds as though it could be folk song. Hugill hears Polish tunes in it, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s own introduction speaks of klezmer melancholy and Polish folk melodies. Fanning is more careful, noting that neither the composer nor his commentators left any clue as to whether the themes are borrowed or invented. Either way the tone is bittersweet, and closer to private song than to public display.

The work first reached an audience in the composer’s own arrangement for cello and piano, which according to Fanning was played in November 1953 by the cellist Daniil Shafran with the pianist Nina Musinyan, and published the following year. No performance of the orchestral version during Weinberg’s lifetime has been documented. Like much of his music, it has come into its own only in recent decades.

What to Listen For

The Fantasia plays without a break for a little under twenty minutes, and its shape is an arch. It begins slowly, gathers speed step by step to a fast central section, and then retraces its steps to end as quietly as it began.

After a short orchestral introduction of Romantic warmth, the cello enters with the main melody, a long, folk-like tune with a tinge of melancholy. Notice how lightly Weinberg scores the accompaniment, so that the soloist never has to force.

The next section is a little quicker and lighter on its feet, with the lilt of a dance. It leads to the central Allegro con fuoco, robust and vigorous music in which the cello has to work hard against the full orchestra.

The energy drains away into a cadenza for the cello alone, strong in gesture but still melancholy in mood. From there the music goes back the way it came: the lighter dance returns, then the opening melody, now gentler than before, and the piece fades into silence.