It’s probably fair to say that Weinberg isn’t best known for his comic gifts. Yet dozens of his film scores confirm that he possessed them, and in 1975 he conceived a double bill of comic operas. Wir gratulieren!, based on Sholem Aleichem’s Mazl tov!, was the first to be composed; the other, using very similar vocal forces, was to Shaw’s spoof melodrama Passion, Poison and Petrification. Weinberg himself wrote the libretto in both cases.

The story of Mazl tov! is set in 1899, in the kitchen of a house run by an unnamed Madame, who sings briefly offstage, upbraiding her cook and maidservant (Beylya and Fradl, respectively) for their laziness. Those two are wooed by, respectively, Reb Alter, a travelling bookseller, and Khaim, a lackey from a neighbouring house. The title of the story is the traditional Jewish wedding toast, which the two couples sing to one another as they form their attachments in the second act.

The initial mood is comparable to the opening of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – the same evocation of disappointment and lethargy in a stifling provincial environment. But where Shostakovich follows Leskov into terror and tragedy, Weinberg follows Sholem Aleichem into melancholy and mirth. Having himself made music in a Jewish theatre in his youth, he had a plentiful store of melodies and rhythms to draw on, and it is these that give the opera its memorable colouring.

This 2012 Berlin Konzerthaus performance was the Western premiere. I was there and can testify to both the pathos and the comic effect – a pity it wasn’t filmed. Henry Koch’s reduced orchestration works a treat, and Ulrike Patow’s German translation is admirably effective. The five vocal soloists are fully in character.

All credit to Oehms Classics for making this German Radio recording available. Ordinarily I might question the need for two CDs, the absence of an English translation and the placing of a track-point in the middle of the crucial set-piece aria (at the end of Act 1, where Reb Alter speaks of a simple Jewish folk poet who hid his tears as he railed against the world). But none of this matters compared to the filling of a major gap in the Weinberg discography.