The conference aims to explore various aspects of Weinberg’s life and music.
Co-sponsored by the British Academy and the Warsaw-based Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the conference is being attended by scholars from Poland, Britain, Germany, the United States, Belarus, Russia and Sweden.
The composer’s daughter, Victoria Bishops, is the event’s guest of honour.
The musical programme includes Weinberg’s 17 string quartets performed at intervals throughout the event by the Quatuor Danel, and two concerts of vocal chamber works, featuring the song-cycle Old Letters, the Sonata for Solo Double Bass, and the Piano Sonata No. 6.
The conference ends on Sunday.
Weinberg was a Polish Jew, born in Warsaw 100 years ago this month. He escaped the Nazis by fleeing into the Soviet Union, and settled in Moscow in 1943, working as a composer and pianist.
In 1953, he was arrested as part of Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges, but was released after Stalin’s death thanks to support from his close friend Dmitri Shostakovich, the well-known Russian composer and pianist.
Weinberg died in Moscow in 1996, leaving behind a vast output of symphonic, chamber and vocal music as well as six operas.
These include The Portrait, based on a short story by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, and The Passenger, an opera about Auschwitz that was described as a masterpiece by Shostakovich.
Recent years have seen a rediscovery of Weinberg’s music, with numerous productions of his operas and a wide selection of his works released on CDs.
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