Shostakovich: Quartet No.10 in A flat major, Op.118 (1964)
Andante
Allegretto furioso
Adagio –
Allegretto – Andante
The tenth quartet – dedicated to Shostakovich’s friend, the composer Mosei Weinberg (whose own quartets are now making headway, thanks to the advocacy of the Quatuor Danel) – is rather like the head of Janus, in that it looks both backwards and forwards. That simplification of form and texture found in Nos.7 and 8 had a decidedly stronger influence here than on its predecessor, and it is this which has most affected the character of an otherwise typically middle period work. The obvious exception to this is the heavily scored Allegretto furioso, which must be one of the fiercest of a particularly aggressive species of scherzo movements. This sadistic creature is preceded by an Andante so simple that (as Norman Kay has suggested) it could almost pass for an extended anacrusis to the second movement. As in Shostakovich’s next quartet, it is the solo violin which had initiated proceedings; this passage immediately balanced by three-part polyphony of a strangely grey plainness, which at one point becomes positively mysterious when part of the second subject group is recapitulated sul ponticello – one of only two such instances of this effect in all the quartets.
Following the example of Quartets 3 and 6, Shostakovich casts his slow movement in the form of a passacaglia, whose ground theme is likewise recalled (in diminution) to crown the climax of the finale. This Adagio has a curious overall shape in that, after the initial fortissimo espressivo presentation of the ground, the feeling is one of a gradual running down; of the emotions being exhausted. Out of its final suspended A flat chord the viola sets in motion a gentle trepak, no more than a whispered thought at first. After two totally different ideas have been propounded – the first of them suggesting a nasal Eastern flavour, enclosed within widely spaced drones – the trepak returns to fuel a long controlled crescendo which sucks all the other material of this movement, with ever increasing dissonance, into its inexorable push towards the restatement of the passacaglia theme. As the very opening of the quartet returns (at a slightly slower tempo) to provide a satisfying rounding off, the otherwise unclouded dreaminess is faintly disturbed by the persistent intrusions of a little chromatic offshoot – a signpost towards the note-rows in the twelfth quartet? At least there is no trace of furioso as the music drops off to sleep.
© Alan George
