The Arcadia Quartet has won multiple international chamber music competitions, including in Hamburg (2009), Almere (2011), London (2012), and Osaka (2014).
Composition History
Weinberg's String Quartet No. 1, composed in 1937, was extensively revised in 1985, resulting in a new opus number (Op. 141) due to the significant changes.
Historical Context
Weinberg's Sixth Quartet was blacklisted during the 1948 anti-formalist campaign, and he later endured imprisonment in 1953 due to family connections to the Doctors' Plot.
Compositional Technique
The finale of Weinberg's String Quartet No. 7 features a colossal series of twenty-three variations on a viola theme, presented in a roughly palindromic design.
Composer Biography
Before fleeing the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Mieczysław Weinberg was largely self-taught as a composer, learning from his piano repertoire and his father's Jewish theatre band.
Composer's Artistic Vision
In his String Quartet No. 11, Weinberg experimented with a tone of intimate, deceptive simplicity, with two and a half movements played muted.
Notable Performances
The Borodin Quartet premiered Weinberg's String Quartet No. 7 in 1957 and went on to premiere several of his other quartets, with their cellist Valentin Berlinsky calling them 'An encyclopaedia of the quartet art'.
