This time, a bit more of the article. Excerpts from Olga Myschkina’s article in OpernWelt – September, October 2025″. Acacias”—this is the name of Weinberg’s song cycle. It possesses both atmospheric density and that aphoristic, sharpened, rhapsodic spirit that we will later encounter in the stage works of this Polish-Jewish composer. In the noble and emotional interpretation of Joanna Klisowska and her piano partner, Katarzyna Neugebauer, this ambivalence unfolds beautifully. The sixth and final song of the cycle is particularly impressive.Klisowska captivates here with her luminously bright soprano, flourishing in the midrange through great intensity, while the pianist conjures from the piano transparent sonorities that linger for a long time (…)

A cycle of Jewish songs, this time set to poems by Samuel Halkin, is titled „Tsu di royte kriger.” You can practically hear the Red warriors rushing across the steppe, determined to do anything, ruthless towards themselves and others, almost debauched. Here, the pianistic virtuosity of Katarzyna Neugebauer is striking, maintaining clarity even amidst a hailstorm of the most violent sonic cascades, yet still finding time to unfurl a carpet beneath her singer—on the turbulent, picturesque ground—like Greek flokati. This duet beautifully manages to convey a sarcastic, contrasting image (in the second song, „Di muter”), completely without pathos, with a keen sense of rhetorical energy and a sense of the senselessness of this war, which in the last song—bearing the same title as the first—reveals itself once again in all its peculiar, brutal, musically garish cruelty. There is something of a dance grotesque in it in the spirit of Shostakovich and George Grosz (…).

The richness and diversity of Weinberg’s style are documented in two more pieces in this album: the Three „Songs,” Op. 22, to poems by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, breathe a breath of longing, rapture, and neo-Romantic nostalgia. The soprano moves through space like a bird: almost trilling. One might expect this lightness to be fleeting if one knows Weinberg. And so it is: as if from nowhere, the entire misery of his existence suddenly appears before us.In „The Ballad of the Death of Isaac Kon,” a six-minute lamento misterioso. It is deeply moving how nobly, yet intimately, Joanna Klisowska and Katarzyna Neugebauer perform this song.

full text https://www.der-theaterverlag.de/…/wo-die-akazie-blueht/