Kristina Reiko Cooper: Weinberg & Korngold: Hidden Legacies
Delos

Cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper is a virtuoso but also a musician of deep conscience and historical awareness. Testifying to that, the Juilliard alumnus delivered in 2022 the world premiere of Lera Auerbach's Symphony No. 6 “Vessels of Light,” a work Cooper helped midwife into being and that honours the heroic efforts of a Japanese consul who issued thousands of life-saving transit visas to Jews during WWII. She's also a founding musical director of the Israel Chamber Music Society, Vice President of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, and a visiting professor at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music in Tel Aviv, where she lives with her husband and three children.

With Hidden Legacies, she and her collaborators, conductor Constantine Orbelian and the 1988-founded Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra, turn their attention to Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-96) and Erich Korngold (1897-1957), twentieth-century Jewish composers whose works similarly testify to the resilience of the human spirit and the triumph of hope over despair. Both were forced to flee from the Nazis during WWII, yet whereas Korngold left Vienna to become a celebrated Hollywood film composer Weinberg lost his entire family to the Holocaust and later endured incarceration at the Lubyanka and Butyrka prisons. Despite experiencing monumental tragedies, both persevered and in doing so provide inspiring models to today's artists as they confront life-challenging situations of their own.

After creating a strings-only Concertino for Cello and Orchestra in 1948, Weinberg revisited the work eight years later to expand it into the Cello Concerto in C minor. Structured in four movements, the work begins in an intensely lyrical mode that brings Cooper's artistry into the sharpest possible relief. The composer's clear grasp of the instrument's capacity for emotional expression is shown in the sinuousness of the writing and the fluid coupling of soloist and orchestra, and the control with which Cooper articulates the work's resonant themes impresses. The seriousness of the piece is evident in its dramatic solemnity and the haunting expressions of the soloist. The opening adagio segues seamlessly into the livelier second movement, which also presents a more elaborate orchestral arrangement. The folk dimension that's so pervasive in the Fantasia is here too, specifically in playful episodes tinged with Spanish and klezmer flavours. Animation is even more pronounced in a scherzo-styled third movement that calls on the virtuosity of the soloist (listen for the commanding cadenza near movement's end). Mischievous folk gestures surface here also, the music's flirtation with the macabre calling Shostakovich to mind. Closing the circle, the finale maintains the spirited optimism of the preceding parts before returning to the heartfelt lyricism of the opening movement during the work's coda.

As rewarding as the concerto is (and dynamic showcase for the soloist too), even more bewitching is Weinberg's Fantasia for Cello and Orchestra, composed between 1951 and '53. Though it's structured in three parts, it unfolds in one continuous movement for about eighteen minutes. As with the concerto, the Fantasia opens in adagio mode, in this case with low-register strings instating a dreamily intimate atmosphere and setting the stage for the soloist's tremulous entrance. Cooper's measured voicing of the intoxicating folk theme entrances, as does the luscious orchestral accompaniment the cello appears alongside. An abrupt shift occurs to signal the onset of the central allegro, the character of the music now dance-like, sunny, and light-of-foot (even a tad Stravinsky-esque), until a short third section hauntingly reintroduces the theme to usher the work to a hushed resolution.

Korngold's Cello Concerto in C Major, which started out as part of his final score for Warner Brothers in 1946 for the film Deception, followed his violin concerto by a year but is less popular, at least insofar as recordings are concerned: while upwards of eighty of the violin work have been produced, a mere ten of the one for cello are currently listed. One reason might have to do with brevity, as at twelve minutes it's conspicuously short for a concerto (Weinberg's by comparison is thirty-three). Like the Fantasia, Korngold's concerto is presented in a single movement but contains three distinct sections. Opening cinematically with a gong crash, the piece moves into a boisterous opening before the soloist comes forward to deliver the work's primary theme, its tone romantic and rapturous. Tempos fluctuate between slow and fast thereafter but always with the cello soloist leading the charge. A mournful passage is distinguished by Cooper's plaintive emoting and punctuated by a chromatic flute flourish until the pace accelerates and the musicians collectively propel towards the finish line.

March 2026