A Conversation With LINUS ROTH: Crusading for Weinberg

The Polish composer Miecyzlaw Weinberg – his Holocaust opera The Passenger caused quite a stir in David Pountney’s premiere staging – has a new champion. The talented young German violinist Linus Roth has taken his music and his legacy to heart in a big way. New recordings of the complete Sonatas and the little heard Violin Concerto (in a coupling with the Britten Concerto) on the enterprising Challenge label reveal a composer of many facets and a deep and abiding conviction. His music chronicles a life of tragedy, determination, and defiance, and in this exclusive audio podcast Roth talks to Edward Seckerson about Weinberg’s extraordinary journey – his flight from the Nazis, his kinship with Dmitri Shostakovich, and the finding of his own distinctive voice. Roth reveals what it was about Weinberg that spoke so directly to him and how he believes that the Violin Concerto is a major work which will in time achieve the widest currency. He sees his advocacy of the new and the neglected, past and present, as a responsibility – and that it is players not promoters who keep the repertoire growing.