Shostakovich: The Soviet Experience Volume 1 String Quartets

Unlike his 15 symphonies, most of which are “public” in character, Shostakovich’s 15 quartets are notable for their intimacy: they represent the composer’s emotional journey through Soviet life. The Pacifica Quartet’s decision to match them to other Soviet-era quartets is bold, but judging by this first volume, the “Soviet” aspect of the package does not work.

Together with four Shostakovich quartets, the Pacificas play the String Quartet No 13 by Nikolai Miaskovsky (1881-1950), his penultimate work. Next to Shostakovich it sounds conservative, inexpressive. You begin to realise why Shostakovich’s 15 quartets are regarded as the greatest statement in the genre since Beethoven. They use a language – by turns spiky, sinewy, sorrowful – that he could never have got away with in larger-scale works, and their formal adventurousness, miles in advance of Miaskovsky’s conventional design, never fails to astound.

The quartets in this first volume date from the 1950s and 1960s when, amid a changing political landscape, Shostakovich continued to find himself under external pressure. The Fifth is austere and elusive, the Sixth more lyrical and traditional, the three-movement Seventh alternately spare and dissonant, the Eighth a 20-minute outpouring of emotional intensity in the composer’s finest vein. The Pacificas play them with clairvoyant unity of purpose, combining motivic lucidity and naturalness of expression in a way that gives these often difficult masterworks a compelling logic.

Shostakovich

The Soviet Experience: String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich and his Contemporaries

Pacifica Quartet

(Cedille)