Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
String Quartet No. 9, Op. 117
String Quartet No. 15, Op. 144
Carducci Quartet
rec. 2021, Cedars Hall, West Somerset School, Wells, UK
Signum Classics SIGCD786 [60]

Shostakovich’s Ninth Quartet is the way station of his chamber music. Re-engagement in 1961 with his long suppressed Fourth Symphony was a seismic upheaval whose aftershocks continued to rumble three years later when he completed this quartet, eventually shaking him out of his neo-Mussorgskian rut and into his spectral late period. How unclear that ultimate trajectory still was to Shostakovich in 1964 is evinced by the fact that the work eventually bearing Opus 117 was the last of at least two attempts at a ninth quartet.

None of these exertions is apparent in the work itself, which is a return to form after the self-pitying sloppiness of the Eighth Quartet. Grasping the Ninth’s confidence and comparative restraint, the Carduccis’ recording of it is marked by an awareness of textural detail and inflectional color that is refreshing to hear. One could say that theirs is not the “new Shostakovich”—wherein the composer’s music is subjected to interpretive exaggerations for the sake of revealing a purported dissident “truth”—but a “new new Shostakovich”: the product of a present increasingly remote not only from the historical-political context this music emerged from, but even Testimony and its ensuing “Shostakovich Wars”. Searches for extra-musical “meaning”, whatever that may be, never comes at the expense of the music itself.

The opening bars of the Ninth flow with a transparency and unforced pacing that practically conjures the score before the listener. Each thread is subtly variegated by the Carduccis, who find a fine spectrum of shading that distinguish each instrument’s legato phrasing. The cumulative effect is hypnotic, as if these undulating grooves were the rippling of an eternity of which the listener is only a momentary observer. Emblematic of the Carduccis’ recognition of the Ninth as a nexus of stylistic continuation, termination, and new beginnings is their interpretation of the last three movements, beginning with the scherzo, with its obsessive earworm of a motif, which here sounds strikingly like Hindemith – an echo of the composer whose works the young Shostakovich devoured. Their lean sonority in the Adagio fourth movement also highlights the austerity that was to define the composer’s late style to come; its explosive solos of triple and quadruple-stopped pizzicati jabbed by double-stopped fourths anticipating similar moments in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth quartets. Self-indulgence is staved off in the finale, where the Carduccis remain cool under pressure, making all the more unsettling their unison grotesque upward lick of a portamento in the coda.

All roads in Shostakovich’s quartets reach their end in the Fifteenth from 1974, composed only a decade after the Ninth—but what a lifetime had passed in the intervening years!

Some may prefer a more immediately emotive Elegy than what the Carduccis offer here. The contrasting interpretations of two personal favorites come to mind: the Taneyev (last issued on Aulos/Melodiya AMC2-055-1-6) and Fitzwilliam Quartets (most recently issued in a box on Decca 485 3639), respectively anxious and disarmingly sweet-toned. It leads to an arrestingly deadpan account of the succeeding Serenade and Intermezzo, their bitterness coming through powerfully, followed by a Nocturne which offers little of the relief heard in other recordings. Ambuscade properly set up, the Carduccis unleash upon the listener a shocker of an opening dotted figure in the Funeral March, whose vehemence establishes this moment as the emotional climax of this quartet and Shostakovich’s very last works. After an Epilogue that sways between passion and numbness, until it ebbs away into the void, catatonic, the listener is left at the edge of the abyss pondering the words of Edouard Levé: “We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.”

Néstor Castiglione

Buying this recording via a link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free