Shostakovich: String Quartets No. 3 & No. 8 (2022)

There are many other performances of these two quartets by Shostakovich, but their pairing here in the hands of the Novus Quartet may be unique; several other groups have included the brief String Quartet No. 7 in F sharp minor, Op. 108, as an entr'acte, but the Novus Quartet does well to maintain the tension by omitting that. The two works each arose at especially difficult points of Shostakovich's creative life and have much to say to each other. The String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Op. 73, was written in 1946, and its ... Read More

There are many other performances of these two quartets by Shostakovich, but their pairing here in the hands of the Novus Quartet may be unique; several other groups have included the brief String Quartet No. 7 in F sharp minor, Op. 108, as an entr'acte, but the Novus Quartet does well to maintain the tension by omitting that. The two works each arose at especially difficult points of Shostakovich's creative life and have much to say to each other. The String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Op. 73, was written in 1946, and its movement structure reflects the composer's attempts to juggle state demands for socialist realism with his own economical takes on classical forms. Its five movements have traditional tempo titles, but on the advice of friends, he added subtitles referring to the just-ended war to each one ("Blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm," "Rumblings of unrest and anticipation," "Forces of war unleashed," "In memory of the dead," and "The eternal question: why? and for what?"), so that he... Read Less