Program
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
String Quartet No. 7, Op. 108 (1960)
String Quartet No. 10, Op. 118 (1964)
Dmitry Borodin – first violin
Olga Artyugina – second violin
Dinara Muratova – viola
Vladimir Slovachevsky – cello
String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat minor, Op. 138 (1970)
Olga Volkova first violin
Ivan Subbotkin, second violin
Nail Bakiev, viola
Miriam Prandi, cello
Details
Dmitri Shostakovich turned to the genre of string quartet being a mature master, who wrote the operas “The Nose” and “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, three ballets, and five symphonies, and he never abandoned it until the end of his life. Since the time of the Viennese classics, quartets have been considered as a sort of reduced symphonies, it has become common to look for and find in them the features of orchestral writing, a large dramatic form – all those features that could be defined as “symphonism”. Shostakovich has it all. However, there is something else in Shostakovich’s quartets: a unique property of chamber music writing, in which the instruments have equal parts, each containing unexpected timbre finds and opportunities for major solo utterances.