The saddest music in the world

It’s a strange compliment to pay a composer — that the most profound impression their music makes is of an absence. I can’t claim much prior experience of the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who died in 1996: a vague sense of a Shostakovich-like figure who had a bad time of it under Stalin, and the composer of an opera, The Passenger, for which great claims are made by people whose judgment I respect but who probably, on balance, spend too much time with their heads in Eastern Europe. By the end of the first evening of this ‘Weinberg Weekend’, devised by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, I felt slightly ashamed about that.

Gidon Kremer played his own violin transcription of Weinberg’s 24 Preludes for solo cello. Throughout the hour-long cycle — Kremer’s idea — images by the Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus came and went on a screen above his head — scenes of Soviet Pioneer children under lowering skies, trolleybuses on potholed roads, and figures silhouetted against icy public squares.