Shostakovich: String Quartets, Volume 3

The new installment of the complete String Quartets by Shostakovich played by Quartetto Noûs brings together the quartets 2, 4 and 6, as well as the impressive and moving piano quintet.

Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich
Artists: Quartetto Noûs

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With this latest volume in their ongoing cycle, recorded in 2023, the Quartetto Noûs passes the halfway mark of Shostakovich’s 15 quartets. The previous instalments have been recognised and praised for their full-blooded intensity and uncompromising address to the detail of these absorbing
scores.
The present album returns almost to the start of Shostakovich’s quartet cycle, with a piece which he claimed (perhaps as a joke) he had originally written as his Second Quartet, before adding a piano part to make it a Piano Quintet with which he could tour and earn much-needed income. At any rate, the Piano Quintet took shape in 1940 and soon became one of his most popular pieces of chamber music: less radical in form and harmony than most of his quartet writing, more extrovert in mood, and more approachable.
The Second Quartet proper was composed in 1944, soon after the Leningrad Symphony which had won the composer international celebrity. Yet the two works exemplify the contrast in style between Shostakovich’s ‘public’ and ‘private’ works.
The Waltz of the Second Quartet is one of the most extraordinary examples of his ability to transform instrumental writing into a kind of nightmare factory. Having begun in a determined A major, the Quartet closes in a much more equivocal minor.
The Fourth Quartet of 1949 likewise sets out in an almost folksy D major, working in elements of Yiddish melodies, and its skies gradually cloud over during the four movements, until the sadness of the second movement and the vitality of the third fuse to produce the violent, wailing and screaming tones of a danse macabre in the complex finale. By the time of the Sixth Quartet, written in 1955, Shostakovich had become a practised exponent of double-edged rhetoric, of music which wears a happy face while twisting its hands in anxiety or even agony.
The serene light of G major bathes the initial Allegretto, but there are signs of grief, perhaps occasioned by the recent death of his wife Nina, scattered throughout the composition.

Tracklist:
Dmitri Shostakovich:
String Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 68:
00:00:00 I. Overture. Moderato con moto
00:08:36 II. Recitative and Romance. Adagio
00:20:02 III. Waltz. Allegro
00:25:49 IV. Theme with Variations. Adagio – Moderato con moto
Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57:
00:37:14 I. Prelude. Lento – Poco più mosso – Lento
00:42:13 II. Fugue. Adagio
00:51:58 III. Scherzo. Allegretto
00:55:18 IV. Intermezzo. Lento
01:02:12 V. Finale. Allegretto
String Quartet No. 4 in D Major, Op. 83:
01:09:35 I. Allegretto
01:13:02 II. Andantino
01:19:23 III. Allegretto
01:23:50 IV. Allegretto
String Quartet No. 6 in G Major, Op. 101:
01:33:38 I. Allegretto
01:40:27 II. Moderato con moto
01:45:47 III. Lento
01:50:46 IV. Allegretto


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