“I simply cannot stop enthusing about Weinberg’s The Passenger,” wrote Dmitri Shostakovich in 1968. “I’ve heard it three times now, studied the score, and every time I understand more of the beauty and greatness of this music. It is a work of consummate form and style and its subject extremely relevant.” 

Shostakovich was a friend and colleague of Weinberg, his chosen partner for a historically riveting two-piano performance of the Tenth Symphony. When the younger man, who was born in Warsaw in 1919, fled to the Soviet Union to escape the Nazis, Shostakovich took him under his wing and helped him avoid some of the ideological snares set by Stalin’s regime. Over the last decade, Weinberg’s once neglected output is taking rightful its place among the greats thanks to a string of recordings with first-class soloists, conductors and ensembles.

The Passenger might well be Weinberg’s magnum opus. Composed in 1968, it never got beyond the rehearsal stage, having to wait until 2010 for its first performance at the Bregenz Festival. Set simultaneously on an ocean liner in 1960 and, via flashback,...