Brodsky Quartet celebrate their 50th anniversary with a complete cycle of Shostakovich’s String Quartets across one weekend, played in the intimacy of Hall One, interleaved with talks.

In this special anniversary weekend, the Brodsky Quartet present the full cycle of Shostakovich’s String Quartets. Each concert includes a performance of two quartets and a brief introduction from Elizabeth Wilson, who will share her extensive knowledge of Shostakovich’s life and music, with each of the 15 string quartets examined and illuminated through lively discussion with members of the Brodsky Quartet.

Paul Cassidy, viola, writes: ‘Perhaps because of its position in the cycle, between Nina, Dmitri and Irina and the four members of the Beethoven Quartet, the Quartet No. 10 always strikes me as a little oasis. Whilst its outer movements remain eerily subdued, drained of hope and with little to prove, they do nonetheless serve to highlight two of the most striking movements in the whole set. The ‘Furioso’ second, with its 347 bars of unrelenting venom is arguably the most bitter of his tirades. This is followed by a particularly beautiful Passacaglia whose form is a bit of a Shostakovich trademark. Rather in the way that so many of Beethoven’s great slow movements are in fact sets of variations, so the Passacaglia form allows Dmitri to lay out a bass line and repeat it as often as necessary, adding more and more beauty around it. Like Bach before them, these two giants were formidable improvisers.

And so we come to Quartet No. 15. Frankly, what to say? This is the most intimate and profound commentary on the eternal question of life and death. The music is stripped back to its bare bones, perpetually alone. Only for one brief moment of its heavenly length do the four players collectively exist. The work is full of emotion, beauty, love, tragedy, humour – it’s all there, but expressed existentially by a mind which appears to be straddling that nebulous line between reality and the unknown. It was Shostakovich’s genius which allowed him to capture these images for us mere mortals to reflect upon.’

This concert will last approx. 1hr 20min with no interval

This concert forms part of Brodsky Quartet’s weekend celebration of all of Shostakovich’s String Quartets. See details for The Complete Shostakovich Quartets.

Elizabeth Wilson is the author of Shostakovich- A Life Remembered, considered by many to be the most vivid, informative and revealing biography of the composer. As a cellist, she studied in Moscow with Mstislav Rostropovich – during which time she encountered Shostakovich, and attended the premières of many of his later works.  As a performer she has worked with such major composers as Arvo Part, Alfred Schnittke and James MacMillan, and as a biographer has also written of Jacqueline Du Pre and her teacher Rostropovich. Her most recent book, Playing with Fire, is devoted to the life and times of the maverick Soviet pianist Maria Yudina, friend and champion of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Hindemith and Stravinsky.