String Quartet No. 5 was written in the autumn of 1945 and was performed on 17 May 1947 in Moscow by the Beethoven Quartet, to whom it was dedicated. Years later, the composer returned to this Quartet and arranged it for orchestra as the four-movement Chamber Symphony No. 3, Op. 151 (performed on 18 November 1991). It was several years before that he had first begun to turn to his scores from almost half a century earlier, and he already had 17 string quartets under his belt. It was also then that he arranged his String Quartets No. 2 and No. 3 as Chamber Symphonies No. 1 and No. 2, and in the summer of 1987 that he confided to a friend: “I’m looking through the baggage of my youth. Sometimes I find something in there that is worth rethinking.” (...) Initially, the String Quartet No. 6 had a promising reception.(...) However, the Sixth Quartet proved to be an unlucky work for Weinberg, and it was probably not until 24 January 2007 in Manchester that the piece was heard by an audience for the first time, performed by Quatuor Danel. (...) Wajberg briefly returned to quartet format in the autumn of 1950 when he wrote his Improvisation & Romance (Adagio. Andante). (...) The first ever performance of Improvisation and Romance that we know of only took place in 2018 (Quatuor Danel, Lucerne). Featured in this album, the piece is not only related in its character to String Quartet No. 5 but it also crowns Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s complete string quartets recorded by the Silesian Quartet – like an unpretentious encore after a successful concert. Danuta Gwizdalanka.
"the performances of all the Silesians’ releases that I have heard are uniformly excellent and musically insightful, as is also the case with this latest release." - BBC Music Magazine, February 2023
