You can probably tell by the high number of reviews I've devoted to recordings of the music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) that I'm a fan of this composer's work. There are a few reasons for this, but the most obvious one is that Weinberg's music very much resembles the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, whom I consider to be the best composer of the 20th century. Despite stemming from different backgrounds, they became friends and pretty well witnessed the indignities of the world around them the same way. But oddly enough this Symphony No. 13, Op. 115, except for a handful of random moments, does not fit the mould or adopt the usual framework. It's a profoundly personal statement, written in 1976, "dedicated to the memory of his mother who had perished, with his father and sister, in the Polish transit camp at Trawniki in the early 1940s." (Booklet notes). It's in one single extended movement, which gradually builds on loosely organized motifs to a strong climactic central declamation, riddled with odd orchestral ostinatos punctuated by percussion, only to once again gradually retreat and decay towards a trademark enigmatic conclusion. It does not contain any memorable or powerful thematic passages à la Shostakovich, but instead seems to cast its gaze inward. An inspective scrutiny of Weinberg's own feelings regarding his mother, and how she died. Written as a kind of closure you could say, that the composer had no intention in sharing with the rest of the world. Oddly and befittingly enough, this is its world première recording

The other work on this CD, the Serenade for Orchestra, Op. 47, No. 4 written about 30 years earlier, is a completely different animal. Once in a while, Weinberg would dish out light-hearted, untroubled and folk-inspired pieces to placate the authorities frowning on his less-than-popular output. Its Adagio movement in particular, with its wistful clarinet tune, sounds more like something a cowboy would whistle riding into the sunset, in a Western musical. Come to think of it, most of it as an obvious "American" dust bowl era feel about it, with a sprinkling of typical Shostakovich irony thrown in for effect.

Conductor Vladimir Lande has already demonstrated his affinity for the music of Weinberg on a few of the previous releases within this Naxos cycle of the composer's symphonies, and this one is no exception. He became the Siberian State Symphony Orchestra's new artistic director and chief conductor in 2015. They in turn have already been involved recording other Weinberg symphonies on the Toccata Classics label as well as Naxos. This is yet another fine instalment in a particularly fine ongoing series.