Shostakovich String Quartets

[snyprrr]

Ah, the smell of DSCH SQs in the morning!


I took the Kreutzer 4/7/8 for a spin. Yes, the 4th is wonderful here, just right. I'd have to consult my List above to see where it stands in the pantheon.

No.7 here has a slow mvmt. that is twice as long as all the others; it really leaves an interesting impression. The finale isn't as raving as some others, but, overall, this is a very interesting 7th. Skipped the 8th for now.


I don't think a marathon is in the offing, though. It's hard getting back into the string sonority coming from Stravinsky, whose SQs don't really prime one for something like DSCH.

[Karl Henning]

I took the Kreutzer 4/7/8 for a spin. Yes, the 4th is wonderful here, just right. I'd have to consult my List above to see where it stands in the pantheon.

No.7 here has a slow mvmt. that is twice as long as all the others; it really leaves an interesting impression. The finale isn't as raving as some others, but, overall, this is a very interesting 7th.

How do they milk the Lento so? (← rhetorical question)

[Mirror Image]

I'll be ripping this set pretty soon to my iPod:



This is probably my favorite set overall. I also own the Borodin (half cycle --- older recordings on Chandos), Brodsky (Teldec), Emerson (DG), and Pacifica (Cedille) sets.

[BasilValentine]

The Borodin complete (Kopelman, Abramenkov, Shebalin, Berlinsky) is my go to set, a mix of studio and a few live performances. For me, the quartets are the grounding center of Shostakovich's music, nothing less than excellent and remarkably varied — although I have always been slightly put off by 8. I'm sure all the self-quotations had some special significance for the composer, but they don't do much for me except take me out of the frame of the work.

[SurprisedByBeauty]

On the occasion of receiving the new Borodin String Quartet cycle on Decca (their third, not counting the half-hearted effort on Virgin), I just finished one of my labor-of-love discographies:

A Survey of Shostakovich String Quartet Cycles



http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2018/10/a-survey-of-shostakovich-string-quartet.html

[Karl Henning]

Nice, Jens.

[Artem]

I enjoy those discography series a lot. Thanks for making them.

[SurprisedByBeauty]

I enjoy those discography series a lot. Thanks for making them.

Thanks for the kind words. Feedback is always sweet.

[Herman]

Here are a couple of my ruminations as I listened to the Pacifica Qt's box.

Shostakovich composed fifteen quartets, the most popular of which are nr 8 and nr 10, which have both been turned into pieces for string orchestra. This may be an indication that the words "string quartet" and "popular" don't really belong in one sentence.

Over the years I have found I gravitate towards the quartets DSCH wrote in homage to people he was close with. Of course we don't know what was in the back of his mind whenever he was composing. However we know that the Seventh Quartet (1960) was dedicated to the memory of his wife Nina, who had died six years before. And I especially love the Quartets Eleven thru Fourteen which were dedicated to the members of  the Beethoven Quartet who had played (often premiered) all of his works for string quartet. It is somewhat ironic to know that the composer actually preferred the younger Borodin Quartet, with whom he rehearsed, too, at the time he was composing his nrs 11 - 15. He just didn't want to hurt his older friends of the Beethoven Quartet. I can't help but think this is what DSCH was like. These musicians were the people he really cared about.

The Eleventh (1966) was dedicated to the 2nd violinist of the Beethoven Qt, Vasily Shirinsky, who had died the year before. The piece consists of seven rather short character pieces; only the Elegy lasts five minutes  -  in which the 2nd violin hardly ever needs more than the lowest string. Nr Twelve is dedicated to the 1st violinist, Dmitry Tsyganov. Ironically, the piece starts as a string trio, the 2nd violin remaining silent for more than thirty bars, the entire first theme. It is one of DSCH most player-friendly pieces. It's that not always an easy piece to play, but it's got beautiful legato lines and there's just a lot of stuff to do and the audience will clearly see you doing it.

The Thirteenth Quartet (1970) was dedicated to the viola-player of the Beethoven Qt, Vadim Borisovsky, who had just been replaced by Fyodor Druzhinin (who was a student of Borisovsky, and in turn a teacher of Yuri Bashmet). In Elizabeth Wilson's oral history Druzhinin recalls how he was in a rehearsal noodling way up high on his fiddle when the composer asked him to hit that (impossibly) high note again. It's the B flat that eventually became the searing high note at the end of the Thirteenth Quartet. It's about the highest note one can technically play on the viola. Nr Thirteen is in my view one of DSCH's crowning achievements, the most successful quartet in terms of power and the way the medium is pushed.

It's amusing how the composer asked the four players to tap their bows against the body of their instruments in the middle section (described by a Emerson Qt member as "the boogiewoogie from hell") . Nobody does that anymore. Instruments are too fragile and expensive. Most players (not that many quartets perform this piece) tap the bows on the music stand now, which is only a partial solution, since most bows first rate players use approach the $100.000 range, too.

[Herman]

The Fourteenth Quartet, composed after a long period of hospitalization following the premiere of Symphony nr 15, is the odd one out. It's dedicated to the Beethoven Qt's cellist, Sergei Shirinsky, who starts with a hunt-like solo, and there are several more solo turns for the cello later on. Almost every player gets to do a solo in this piece, which is the least "quartet-like" quartet in DSCH's catalogue, and yet it is one of the most appealing late DSCH pieces, with its singing lines, a showstopping violin solo at the start of the middle mvt, a ten bar viola solo, unaccompanied, and the "Italian bit" appearing twice  -  a unisono duet for first violin and cello with the other two fiddles strumming like a guitar. It's the complete opposite of nrs 13 and 15, a generous piece that is easily relatable, and I don't understand why it isn't performed more often. Quartets should take this piece on tour and see what happens.

The Fifteenth is the successor of the Thirteenth quartet, very sparse and focused, too. It uses the same bullet note device as at the end of nr 13, at the beginning of the second mvt, only now the piercing sforzandos are handed from one fiddle to the other. After having dedicated four quartets to his friends of the Beethoven Qt, DSCH wrote this piece for himself, pretty much as his epitaph. I'm not the world's biggest fan of this piece. I have seen this piece in performance a number of times, most notably by the Borodin Quartet in the late eighties. They put a big candelabra on the stage and blew out the candles at the end. It gave the whole performance a lugubrious atmosphere which I had a hard time with. I like to think music and all art is a celebration of life. Nr. 15 does not give one a lot of chances there. It was premiered by the Taneyev Quartet, because the Beethoven's primarius, Shirinsky, died as he was rehearsing the piece.

Nr 15 is definitely a piece one should experience live, because it's a very theatrical composition. This is an integral part of DSCH's m.o. His symphonies use the theatrical devices of loud and soft, massive tuttis and delicate solos a lot. This happens in the quartets, too. In nr 13 there is the massive B flat trill in the viola part in the bars leading up to the aforementioned boogie woogie. The music stays in an unambiguous dominant for something like eighteen bars before were back to the tonica (incidentally nr 13 starts as a dodecaphonic piece, but DSCH is very much having his cake here and eating it too: there's never any ambiguity as to where we are, harmonically). It's like we're in a dark tunnel just waiting for the B flat light to reappear. In nr 15 the entire opening Elegy is like this, and it is one of the longer movements in DSCH quartets. Only in the Serenade movement, after the bullet notes have stopped ringing out, a melody and accompaniment appears. It's a major achievement, composing a piece this long, 35 minutes, every movement in an unrelenting E flat minor (no open strings whatsoever), with so little material to go on. It's an absolute masterpiece one should not hear too often.

[Karl Henning]

Nice, Herman.

[Herman]

Did I have any preferences as to the performers?
I don't know all recordings. Of the ones I have I tend to prefer the ca 1980 Borodin Qt; certainly in the really intense and dramatic pieces, nr 13 and nr 15, which one should really witness live, they get closest to the required dramatic intensity.

However the Pacifica is very good across the board, and sometimes the Beethoven Qt is very good too (nr 14). I like the Emersons, too, who recorded the entire cycle live. I am somewhat underwhelmed by the Fitzwilliam. It was a brave effort, but they just don't have what it takes. Same for either Brodsky.

[Karl Henning]

I had a similar feeling about the Fitzwilliams.

[amw]

My preference is for the Taneyev Quartet in 1-9 and the St Petersburg Quartet in 10-15, but the 2018 Borodin Quartet recordings definitely seem very much to my taste as well. Also the ca 1965 Borodin Quartet recordings of 1-13 (because the other two hadn't been written yet).

[Karl Henning]

I like the Emerson, the Pacifica, and the Mandelring Quartets very much.

[Herman]

I don't know the Mandelring recordings yet. I'm really hoping the Jerusalem Qt will complete the cycle.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Here are a couple of my ruminations as I listened to the Pacifica Qt's box.

Shostakovich composed fifteen quartets, [interesting ruminations snipped]

I have the Pacifica box, I think it's about time I went thru it from beginning to end. They're maybe my favorite 4tet at the moment; I've heard them several times since they're kind of local to me. Recently they changed 50% of their personnel, but they still sound great.

Anyway...your comments on #13 were interesting, because for years I heard this as a surreal nightmare. I was influenced by the notes to the Fitzwilliam performance, which pointed out how bad DSCH's health was at the time he composed it, stuffed full of pills and medications. Maybe it's time for me to listen to it as pure music and see how it holds up.

Same applies to #15. I hear the quartets 12-15 as a group, because they came after his heart attack when his health was declining and death was in sight. So I've always seen them as very gloomy, haunted works.

[Herman]

Well, obviously, to a degree they are death-haunted works, and it's amazing to think how DSCH wrote quite a bunch of these works while hospitalized, falling aparts from different ailments.

One of the interesting things is the way he uses twelve-tone rows, which he reportedly regarded as a death-like system, probably because of its restraints. So as he is facing death, he turns to dodecaphony, but in a non-dodecaphonic way: he always repeats the tonica note, which is not allowed in strict dodecaphony. However, there is (to my knowledge) no dodecaphony in the 15th SQ).

The beauty of the lighter late quartets, nrs 11, 12 and 14 especially is how full of life they are.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

One of the interesting things is the way he uses twelve-tone rows, which he reportedly regarded as a death-like system, probably because of its restraints. So as he is facing death, he turns to dodecaphony, but in a non-dodecaphonic way: he always repeats the tonica note, which is not allowed in strict dodecaphony. However, there is (to my knowledge) no dodecaphony in the 15th SQ).

I read somewhere that the opening of one of the mvts of #15 is a tone row - it's the one which begins with one solo crescendo after another (I forget which mvt it is exactly).

[amw]

The last five quartets are kind of a group in that they share an extreme simplification of both the material & the instrumental writing, very often reduced to one or two real parts, but at the same time this extremely stripped down material can be dissonant or highly chromatic and strips away many of the more "accessible" features of his earlier work, eg melodies that aren't dodecaphonic, any kind of normal musical rhetoric (apart from funeral marches), and anything resembling climaxes or narrative continuity. We also see this in a few of the other late works eg the Symphony No. 14, the Alexander Blok songs Op. 127, the Michelangelo songs Op. 144, the violin & viola sonatas. I think this tends to make even the "happy" music (eg the 12th and 14th quartets) sound austere and difficult.