Jaromír Weinberger had a sad life. After the popularity of his comic opera Schwanda the Bagpiper, and its rather annoying Polka and Fugue, his music fell into eclipse. His variations entitled “Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree” enjoyed brief fame around the mid 20th century, but otherwise this refugee from Nazi Germany received little further attention as a composer until, suffering from brain cancer, he took his own life in Florida in 1967. Weinberger was well-trained, and his music is full of variations, fugues, and other academic devices that sometimes sit oddly with his folk-influenced but harmonically busy idiom.
The works on this disc offer a case in point. The Overture to a Chivalrous Play dates from 1931, but could have been composed much earlier. Its title describes the music well, but even at only eight minutes the piece outstays its welcome. This is even more true of the Six Bohemian Songs and Dances. Their grouping front-loads the slow music, making listening tedious, and if you’re expecting Dvorák in the innocent freshness of the themes, think again. Weinberger’s melodies want to be folk-like, but he muddies them up with all sorts of chromatic graffiti and harmonic side slips. The result sounds somehow frustrated, as if the tunes were obscured by fog.
The Passacaglia for Organ and Large Orchestra is, obviously, a more abstract piece, and it gives Weinberger an opportunity to show off his fondness for, and skill at, counterpoint (there’s a fugue here too). This is probably the best piece on the disc, although even here the thematic invention does not strike me as having much staying power. Still, it’s quite well played by Albrecht and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and powerfully engineered. If only the actual music were more distinctive…
