Moisei Vainberg

Moisei Vainberg (also and increasingly Mieczyslaw Samuilowicz Weinberg) (December 8 1919 in Warsaw, Poland – February 26 1996 in Moscow, Russia) was a Polish and Jewish composer who spent the last half of his life in (during- and post-Soviet) Russia. His friends there included Dmitri Shostakovich, who interceded with Lavrenti Beria on one critical occasion in Vainberg's life when the composer had been thrown in prison.

His output includes seventeen string quartets, eight violin sonatas (three solo and five with piano,) at least twenty symphonies, six piano sonatas, numerous other instrumental works, many operas, and also a substantial number of film scores. His piano quintet, piano trio and a cello sonata have received performances in concert series and festivals in Ireland and the USA in recent years, and the apparently defunct British record label Olympia released over fifteen compact disc recordings of his music, some but not all remasterings of earlier Melodiya LPs.

There is a similarity in some works of style with Shostakovich and of course vice versa; and Vainberg's fifth symphony , written around the time that Shostakovich's fourth symphony was being taken out of drawers many decades after it was withdrawn during rehearsals, ends somewhat similarly to the older, resurrected work. Another Vainberg work, his sixth piano sonata, quotes one of the Shostakovich op. 87 preludes and fugues . This is atypical, though others — the trumpet concerto , for instance — quote music by other composers, in its case Mendelssohn's well-known Wedding March.

External links

• Onno van Rijen's Weinberg Worklist
• Weinberg-dedicated Site