From their opus numbers you would imagine that Weinberg’s four chamber symphonies are late works. In fact the first three are recastings of string quartets from the 1940s, when the composer was in his twenties. No 1 is for the most part a lively, genial affair which, when heard in this expanded string-orchestral version, seems not so far from the world of Grieg’s Holberg Suite or Tchaikovsky’s Serenade; even when the language occasionally toughens up, the kinship is more with Bartók’s Divertimento than with Shostakovich’s chamber music, which Weinberg had yet to encounter when he wrote the original quartet. If No 3 feels a lot darker and more profound, that may be precisely because the personal and artistic relationship with Shostakovich was by that time well under way (the original quartet version dates from 1945) and had been a decisive factor in shaping Weinberg’s personal voice.

These, then, are two of Weinberg’s most immediately approachable and engaging works, and they make an excellent introduction for newcomers to his output. Nor should anyone taking the economy option with this new Naxos disc feel short-changed. The East-West Chamber Orchestra fully lives up to its billing as the ‘resident orchestra of the Yuri Bashmet International Music Festival … made up of concert masters from leading orchestras and competition laureates’. And Rostislav Krimer has a fine instinct for both works, finding nuances and idiomatic expressive shades that are as persuasive in their way as the marginally more solid Kremerata Baltica. The latter squeeze three symphonies on to one disc, but at the expense of the repeated first-movement exposition of No 1. Given the neoclassical credentials of the piece, I’m inclined to regard this as a more than negligible loss. All the more reason, then, to make the modest outlay for the new disc and to look forward to its (presumed) follow-up with Chamber Symphonies Nos 2 and 4. The recording – made in Minsk, where Weinberg lived for two years and composed the quartet that eventually mutated into the First Chamber Symphony – is spacious but clear.