WEINBERG, MIECZYSŁAW (1919–1996)

2008 GRAMMY^® nominee for Best Instrumental Soloist without orchestra for 20th Century Piano Sonatas on Naxos Records (8.570401), Allison Brewster Franzetti has received international acclaim from critics and audiences alike for stunning virtuosity and musicality. She has performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Long Island Philharmonic, English Sinfonia, Denver Symphony, Colonial Symphony, Queens Symphony, European Women’s orchestra, Buenos Aires Philharmonic, Janáček Philharmonic, and the City of Prague Philharmonic. Solo recitals include critically acclaimed débuts at Merkin Hall, New York and Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, a special performance at the GRAMMY^® Salute to Classical Music honoring Lang Lang and Earl Wild, and concerts throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe, Argentina and Japan. She is a 2003 GRAMMY^® Award nominee and a 2002 Latin GRAMMY^® Award nominee. An accomplished chamber musician, she has collaborated with renowned composers and performers, including Sir James Galway, John Corigliano, Carlos Franzetti, Lowell Liebermann, David Maslanka, Stephen Paulus, Eugenia zukerman, Julius Baker and Robert White.

Like his friend and mentor, Shostakovich, Weinberg was a composer and pianist, whose career progressively emphasized the former rôle at the expense of the latter. From the age of twelve, after an initial period of self-tuition and some experience in his father’s band of theatre musicians, he began taking piano lessons from one Mrs Matulewicz (first name unknown), who ran a music school in Warsaw and who soon realised that his talent would be best nurtured at the Warsaw Conservatory. There he came under the supervision of Józef Turczynski (1884–1953), a pianist and pedagogue of considerable repute. His own recordings, notably of his Piano Quintet with the Borodin Quartet, of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony in duet with the composer, and of the première of Shostakovich’s cycle of Blok Romances, where he stood in for the indisposed Sviatoslav Richter, testify to his continuing fluency.