In 1964 Weinberg produced a follow-up to his Sixth Symphony that displays an even more sharply focused social conscience. The Eighth sets 10 poems by his favourite Polish author, Julian Tuwim, dealing first with the poverty of pre-war Poland, then with the devastation of the country at the hands of the Nazis. The texts and Weinberg’s settings of them amount to a prolonged cry of outrage, though one that ends by gently affirming what the composer called ‘the victory of freedom, justice and humanism’. For one who himself had escaped on foot from Warsaw in 1939, losing his parents and sister in the process and living the rest of his life in exile, the poems could hardly have touched a rawer nerve.

The musical style he adopts is resolutely non-complaisant, which is to say several degrees more challenging than that of the Sixth Symphony. In place of the boys’ choir are adult voices, including three soloists, and the orchestral palette is for long stretches gun-metal grey (the two pianos and xylophones in the seventh setting, ‘Warsaw Dogs’, are notably confrontational). Gone is any trace of folk-like intonations; instead the musical language is more than halfway to the ultra-austerity of the Requiem that Weinberg would begin composing the following year. The Shostakovich influence is also less apparent, unless it be from the most inscrutable pages of his Babiy Yar Symphony. Only with two lugubrious quotations from Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ Sonata is there any easily read level programmaticism, and there is none of the comparative glamour of Penderecki’s oratorical mode. Not an easy listen, then. Still, patient attention is rewarded, however, when the second half of the work springs into denunciatory life and when the later movements unobtrusively tie threads together from the first half.

Apart from the Polish Radio performance conducted by Gabriel Chmura in 2000 that has had some limited private circulation, Naxos here offers the premiere recording. Antoni Wit conducts a thoroughly well-prepared account, with respectable solo and choral singing. Phrasing and overall dramatic shaping are perhaps a little stiff, not surprisingly given the demands of some of the writing. It’s a pity that Naxos cannot run to giving us texts and translations in the booklet, since the poems are the running thread around which Weinberg weaves his challenging, intermittently beautiful music.